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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WOMEN, WAR, AND TEXT; ORSOGNESE WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE IN A
SECTOR OF THE ITALIAN FRONT IN WORLD WAR H.
by
Donna Martha Sudani
submitted to the
Faculty o f the College of Arts and Sciences
of American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in
Anthropology
Chair
Dr. William Leap
Dr. Brett Williams
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
Date/ ? 1997
American University
Washington, D C. 20016
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION
FOR DR. JUAN IILLAMARIN
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iii
Chapter
1. WOMEN, WAR, AND TEXT: THE RELEVANCE OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE TO THE HISTORICAL RECORD AND CULTURAL INTEGRITY...... I
2. ON ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE...... 31
3. TRANSLATING CULTURE...... 63
4. ANALYSIS ...... 105
5. THE ORSOGNESE SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE AS AN INTEGRAL ELEMENT IN CONSTRUCTING A HISTORY 167
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 197
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WOMEN, WAR, AND TEXT: ORSOGNESE WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE IN A
SECTOR OF THE ITALIAN FRONT IN WORLD WAR H.
BY
DONNA M. BUDANI
ABSTRACT
The narratives that women related to this researcher about their lives in Orsogna,
Italy during and immediately after World War H all serve to articulate assumptions about
the perceived nature of community. I use data drawn fi'om an examination of 150
narratives recorded in interviews, occurring in spontaneous conversations, and during field
observations, as well as from an examination of my own reaction. These narratives allow
listeners to participate provisionally in the disorder, dislocation, and privation experienced
by the narrators in war. This study makes two significant contributions to our
understanding of a community whose cultural fabric remained intact during extreme
wartime conditions in one Italian sector. First, the narratives, as texts, reveal how women
connected their experiences to the established cultural meanings of those experiences.
That is, regular patterns of behavior occur as a result o f practices generated in social
interaction. Second, the narratives reveal that what was said depends for its full meaning
and interpretive power on what was unsaid—on beliefs, values, premises encoded in the
cultural matrix of the community.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been very fortunate to have known the Orsognese women I write
about in different relationships; as neighbors, friends, and in some cases, as family. Their
kindness, friendship, and trust have indelibly touched my life. I owe a special debt of
gratitude to the Di Rado family whose generosity in my behalf made my research possible.
I wish to thank my committee. Dr. Geoffrey Burkhart, Dr. William Leap,
and Dr. Brett Williams, for their scholarly judgment, generously given comments and
friendship, and their investment in me and my research. Their direction was invaluable in
shaping this work. Their expertise in the artful craft of anthropology has and will continue
to inspire me in all future endeavors. As my chairman. Dr. Burkhart deserves special
thanks for his steadfast support during my fieldwork and the writing of this research. I
owe Dr. Burkhart a special debt of gratitude that I can never adequately acknowledge.
To Marilyn J. Madden and her mother, Mrs. Marguerite Madden, go
special thanks. Marilyn Madden gave me encouragement, valuable intellectual insights
that spurred my own thinking, and unwavering support that sustained me through the
often trying process of completing what seemed to be an endless piece of work.
Marguerite Madden welcomed me into her heart and her family. She provided the love
and nurturing that always seemed to transform fatigue into energy. Without the kindness
and generosity of the Madden family neither graduate school nor fieldwork would have
been possible.
iii
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To all these people, my deeply felt thanks; my sisters, Laura Jacobellis,
Anna Marie Torre, and Antoinette Sudani kept my spirits from flagging at crucial
moments. My daughter Angela Phillips-Mills and my son Gregory Sudani Phillips
provided consistent warm support and a sense of humor for which I am eternally grateful.
To my editor and friend Margaret Powell goes my sincere appreciation for
generously reading draft upon draft. Her critical insights and editorial expertise helped me
craft my ideas. Her enthusiasm persuaded me to go forward even when I was tempted to
do otherwise.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1
WOMEN, WAR, AND TEXT; THE RELEVANCE OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE TO THE HISTORICAL RECORD AND CULTURAL INTEGRITY.
Introduction
In January 1988, 1 went to Italy to visit my prospective field site,
Mozzogorgna, a village in the Apennine mountains in Abruzzo. Mozzogorgna is the natal
village of my paternal grandparents who migrated to America in 1907 and returned to
Mozzogorgna in 1930. My grandparents were caught in the thick of the battle for the
Sangro River Valley during World War EE. Fighting in Mozzagorgna, as in other villages
and towns in the Abruzzo, was fierce and often marked by hand-to-hand combat. My
grandparents endured many hardships during as well as after the war. Although both are
now deceased and I have no other relatives in the village, I had hoped to gather data there
about women’s experiences during the war. My primary purpose was to establish the
validity of women’s experience as valid data in completing any fully authentic record of
the impact of the war on a village caught in the battle zone
I contacted the Cerchio family (a pseudonym)who had cared for my
grandparents after the war until their deaths in the 1950s. I spent a month in the Cerchio
household conducting preliminary research. Unfortunately, due to issues related to my
grandfather’s transfer of valuable property to their family, the Cerchios evidenced deep
concern that my visit implied a potential legal challenge to my grandfather’s will. Under
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. these circumstances, it was manifestly impossible to conduct ethnographic research in the
manner characteristic of anthropological inquiry. Facing the question of whether I would
be able to carry out my research program in Italy, I took advantage of an invitation to visit
the nearby town of Orsogna. On my train journey to Mozzagorgna from Rome, I
happened to meet a woman who had migrated to New York City with her family in the
1950s and later returned to Abruzzo in the 1970s as a wife and mother of two small
children. As I told her about my research, Regina (a pseudonym) had invited me to visit
with her in Orsogna. She told me about how, in 1943, the battlefront moved into Orsogna
and remained there for nine months. She spoke about the forced evacuation and the total
destruction of the community. Regina shared a few stories about episodes concerning her
mother-in-law’s life during the war. I was intrigued by all she had to tell me. I recall
feeling elated because my hunch about the enriched data of women’s lives as a focus of
anthropological inquiry was indeed validated. Realizing that my research could not go
forward in Mozzagorgna without serious constraint, I took advantage of serendipity and
decided to visit Regina in Orsogna. Not only did I find a community where women were
willing to tell me about their experiences, but I also found a community that took visible
pride in its local history. Various texts on the community’s history, including personal
war-time experiences, had been published. There was also a large corpus of material
concerning the reconstruction of Orsogna after the war and of labor migration since the
late 19th century. Overwhelmed by the rich potential of this anthropological material, I
decided to maintain my original focus—how women made sense of their war-time
experiences—and to make the shift to Orsogna as the site for my study. My fieldwork
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. took place in Orsogna from November 1989 to September 1990, with an additional
month’s stay in July and August 1991. I gathered data extensively, although not
exclusively, in Orsogna, where I lived. Fieldwork and archival research were also
conducted in Rome, Lanciano, L’Aguila, and Chieti.
My interest in women’s experiences during the war began with family
stories that I had heard from childhood. Stories about how my grandmother returned to
Abruzzo in 1932, after immigrating to the United States soon after the turn of the century,
provided the prelude to further stories about her circumstances during the war and her
survival in spite of it. Stories about my grandmother’s life during the war were not merely
second-hand accounts of her experiences. To me, her determination to survive despite the
devastation in the area and the discontinuity in the social fabric of her life was her lived
experience, and, as such, her stories exerted a force and influence of their own.
Family stories, however, had conveyed a great deal about her activities and
nothing about her reactions as a woman to what she experienced. I was, and remained,
curious about how she felt as she managed to live from one day to the next. As proved to
be the case with many of the women I interviewed, my grandmother chose to remain
hopeful in situations where nothing remained to inspire hope. I was curious to know how
she survived and what enabled her to sustain hope when her way of life had been
irrevocably altered. Family stories conveyed some of the data of her experience, but they
could not tell me what it was like to be there. Only she could have done that. To pursue
“her” narratives, to discover the answers to my questions, I had to return to Abruzzo and
found Orsogna to be a promising alternative to Mozzogorgna.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Part I. Women’s Sense-Making
The narratives that women related about their lives in Orsogna during and
immediately after World War n all serve to articulate assumptions about the perceived
nature of community and about concepts of self and relatedness. My analysis of this
material is not intended to be definitive but sets out a range of meanings I find relevant to
my objectives. I use data drawn from the examination of 150 narratives recorded in
interviews, occurring in spontaneous conversation, and during field observation, as well as
fi'om an examination of my own reactions. It was my continuous residence in Orsogna
and my assurance that I was also interested in old letters, diaries, and the personal
mementos individuals might wish to proffer that often induced Orsognese women to bring
these documents and artifacts to me or to tell me about them. In all endeavors related to
the completion of this dissertation, I have tried to be faithful to the narrators, to their
narratives, and to the rules of ethical ethnographic practice.
My research was motivated by my interest in what it means to be a woman
in another culture, in different times, and under conditions other than those with which I
was familiar. One of the core issues of each person’s life is that of meaning making. We
are meaning-seekers as well as meaning-makers who rely on significance to orient
ourselves in the world. Meanings are organized within one’s life story in such a way as to
make sense of experience retrospectively. I am drawn to narratives, whether written or
oral, as one kind of data base because they are primarily concerned with issues of meaning
making and of translating between different meaning systems.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I propose an interpretation of Orsognese women’s narratives about their
experience during World War II that is oriented toward three concepts. I gloss these
concepts as “sociability,” “relatedness,” and “community,” based on principles of social
interaction Orsognese women manifested in their social practice -that is, in the matrix of
interactions and the interpretations of those interactions that constituted community for
them.
What investigators learn in field work is that seemingly uniform categories
like “self’ and “identity” take on different meanings in different contexts. Recent
scholarship has shown that there is no unitary pattern that characterizes the experience of
all women—or men, for that matter. Different perspectives applied to an examination of
women’s sense of self and social identity yield different results; however, there is general
agreement that culture shapes the way people construe their experience and the meanings
they associate with those experiences. What is sometimes considered “ unique “ and “
subjective” has its roots in culturally given ways of understanding the world. Diversity has
replaced assumed universal applicability; thus, in our thinking about concepts such as
“self’ and “identify,” a radical revision is called for in a code whose uniformity has been
taken for granted in objectivist social science.
Ethnoeranhv and Genre
How does one write ethnography and how does one acknowledge her role
in the field situation? How attentive must she be to issues related to refiexivity—or, to her
tendency to function as an autonomous self in the culture she is investigating? Marcus and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cushman (1982), Jack Ruby (1982), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Clifford (1988) and
Rosaldo (1989), and others have drawn attention to the issue of refiexivity. While other
important works have recently emerged on this topic, some of the anthropologists calling
for “reflexive anthropology” have been chided for talking about it rather than actually
doing it and, in the process, have managed to be so reflexive that, as Mascia-Lees et al.
observe, they have successfully directed the spotlight onto themselves (Mascia-Lees et al.
1989).
I sympathize with Tyler’s appraisal that ethnographers undermine the goal
of ethnographic research when they accept without critical examination the discipline’s
uncodified practices for the writing of ethnography, particularly those aspects of the genre
that affect representation and attribute authority to the objective-voiced narrator within
the text (Tyler 1985). Taking the Marcus and Cushman (1982) critique of writing
conventions as his departure point, Tyler (among others) identifies those writing
conventions characteristic of ethnography that are primarily responsible for the “crisis” of
representation: distanced description, the privileging of ethnographer voice to the near
exclusion of all others, and the predominance of intertextuality—the intercomparison of
ethnographic texts in the interest of genetic or structural explanation and aesthetic
understanding. Tyler points out that the desire for objective description grounds
ethnographic intertextuality within the discourse of science. He writes:
Social science discourse discourages narrative subjectivity, personal anecdote, or accounts of the ethnographer’s experience. As a type of social science discourse, ethnography objectivity ensures its intertextuality, for conventions have ensured that no direct and legitimate appeal to the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reader’s subjectivity by way of the author’s experience [be made]. (Tyler 1985, 86)
Tyler holds that the “commonest trope” in ethnographic writing is the trope
of translation. Its symbolic variation, used by anthropologists of a more interpretive
persuasion, “limit language to a few key words—uttered under unreported circumstances—
which are the foci of cultural themes and the sources of the foundational metaphors whose
exegesis constitutes the sense of translation” (Tyler 1985, 89). While I do employ the
dual tropes of translation and key words, my uses of these devices are deeply embedded in
reported contextual data. I present what is often left unstated in ethnography; the
reporting of the experiential data that motivated my further examinations is critical to
recognizing the horizon of meaning that these terms and key words have for the women I
interviewed.
Neither is my voice muted, nor the voices of those women with whom I
interacted. Indeed, a consistent feature running through description and analysis is the
multivocality of the text and the degree to which I worked with what was said to me. I
have employed this pattern throughout to demonstrate that participation was not
subordinated to observation during the course of my fieldwork and that much of my time
was spent, as Tyler recommends, in strict observation of unmediated talk. I have included
excerpts from my field notes and journal for they are accounts of my experience rather
than the means by which my experience became “experience”. I have attempted to render
this ethnography as one that Tyler terms “plurivocal”—ethnography “that mimics on every
page the rationalism which seems to inform it, and reveals between every line the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. difference it conceals in every word . . . so that it might speak not for us but let the other’s
voice be heard, too, and not just for us, but for us both” (Tyler 1985, 89).
As a consequence of attending to refiexivity and keeping in focus the
reciprocal nature of my ethnographic practice, I think I have been able to reveal an
"epistemology" which emerges from the women who talked about their lives, their
experiences, and their reflections on those experiences (Lawless 1992). My field
experience in Orsogna challenged me to further my own knowledge “rather than validate
and authenticate what I already knew or suspected.” Like Lawless, I see my ethnological
approach as a natural product of the evolution of ethnographic studies in North American
anthropology, particularly with respect to refiexivity and the conceptualization of the
ethnographic other (Lawless 1991, 36). Following Lawless, I adopt an approach that she
terms “reciprocal ethnography,” whose goal is to provide “true discourse, both among the
participants and between participant and the ethnographer” (Lawless 1991, 37).
Ethnographv and Gender
Feminist perspectives across disciplines inform our understanding of
selfhood as constituted socially, through social ties and relationships between individuals
and groups of individuals (Bimbaum 1994; Haraway 1988; Harding 1987; Kondo 1986;
Smith 1990). These perspectives have taken a critical view of positivism, its abstractions
and detachment, rejecting its separations between knower and known. Sandra Harding
(among others) suggests that one way to think about gender is as an epistemological
system; there are no “ungendered” perspectives or realities (Flax 1987; Harding 1991).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Within anthropology, most scholars advocate an integrative approach to research which
grounds theory contextually in the realm of women’s everyday lives. Broadly defined,
feminist anthropology refers to understanding how women’s everyday experiences were
and are generated by the larger social structure (Giovannini 1981; Nelson 1974).
Applying a feminist perspective in fieldwork means understanding gender as central in
constructing all social relations and in taking individual women’s lives as a problematic.
As evidenced by the work of Kondo (1990) and Ginsburg (1989), the actual experience
and language of women is considered the departure point for feminist research. Though
differences exist in the various perspectives applied, feminist research in anthropology is
united in its efforts to help us understand how the underlying organizations of actions and
practices, thoughts and beliefs, constitute the ordinary lives of women.
For example, Jane Flax claims that perhaps gender is better understood not
as two distinct categories of experience or as the opposition of inherently different beings
but rather as a type of social relation that is constantly in process (Flax 1987, 637).
Because Flax recognizes the influence of culture-bound ideas, her
perspective permits me to look at women in Orsogna in a more creative and fruitful way
so that I do not impose a structure on them—i.e., separate spheres, male as dominant and
female as oppressed. That is, she indicates that
we need to recover and explore the aspects of social relations that have been suppressed, unarticulated, or denied within dominant (male) viewpoints. We need to recover and write the histories of women and our activities into the accounts and stories that cultures tell about themselves. Yet, we also need to think about so-called women’s activities as these are partially constituted by and through their location within the web of social relations that make up any society. (Flax 1987, 641)
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This process also supports the emic or insider point of view so that my
intent is to communicate and make sense of the meanings women themselves attribute to
their experiences. Finally, Flax provides a departure point for considering gender as the
hub of social relations because it is “the most fruitful way I think an anthropologist can
begin to discover what sense making is from the viewpoint of each gender.” Furthermore,
it is an effective way to avoid culture-bound ideas while one is in the field. Indeed,
according to Flax,
we need to search into all aspects of a society (the feminist critique included) for the expressions and consequences of relations of domination. We should insist that all such relations are social, that is, they are not the result of the differentiated possession of natural and unequal properties among types of persons. (Flax 1987, 641-642)
Gender is the important facet of the self that affects life as it is lived. Engendering is the
process by which cultural norms, orientations, and dispositions are internalized.
Whatever else a self may be, it seems to me that its essential composition is
a composite of cultural knowledge, with gender as its fundamental structuring component,
for individuals are not simply contextualized as social beings but, rather, they are
contextualized as engendered social beings. Therefore, conceptualizing “self’ requires
approaches that do not resort to linear or binary ways of being and thinking.
“A Very Intimate Personal World”
While in Orsogna, friends and acquaintances never allowed me to forget
how fundamental was the notion that contextual, constructed, relational defined selves
participated in social relationships. The following, a field journal entry made upon my
return to Orsogna after a week of archival research in L’Aquila during my sixth month of
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fieldwork, illustrates the distance that existed between our social perspectives at this
juncture;
Journal Entry April 7, 1990
Arrived in Orsogna around 7 PM. My intuition was right. Went directly to Regina’s store and then came home. When I saw Regina, I came down with a case of the “guilties.” I should’ve called her more than once and not just on the day before I left L’Aquila. But I didn’t. I felt like I was suppose to check in. I was away working—“about my work.” Sounds pretty arrogant to me now. Regina was genuinely caring—that annoyed sort of caring I keep bumping into when I forget that I’m in a relationship. I knew I should've called from L’ Aquila. Why didn’t I? What’s going on, Donna? The last time this happened was when Regina told me that Teresa had stopped by the store and said that she hadn’t seen me for two days. I told Regina I would stop by on my way home but I didn’t. Regina was telling me something, she was telling me to pay attention to Teresa. I heard it. I knew the what and why but I still waited two days until‘T ’ decided to go to Teresa’s house. I have to forget m y‘T’ and focus on the connections between me and others. I’m not an “I.” I’m a web. The organization is interesting. Regina's fiiendship is the “authorization” that allows me to work in Orsogna. We’ve shared a great deal of ourselves in such a short period of time. So how do I honor her fiiendship? I assert my autonomous independent self. I’m caught in a different world and I’m making mistakes. Such is life in the field. Roberto and Carla seemed genuinely glad to have me back in Orsogna. So were Teresa and Maria. It’s all about trust and caring about each other’s “good name.” This is a very intimate personal world.
I include this account of my own experience because it clearly illustrates
that in addition to a careful reading of the narratives, I draw on the social situation in the
field to develop my analysis. It was in the experience of fieldwork that I fully appreciated
the intertwined nature of theory and method. More formidable than I had imagined before
undertaking fieldwork, the gathering of “ethnographic data” is based on connections we
make between people and their context—all sorts of things that draw our attention to what
people say and do. I had never before experienced such an awareness of self (my self).
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centered in autonomy, independence, and so hostile toward interdependence as a way of
being in the world. The journal entry reveals how I wrestled with my preoccupation with
autonomy, with the primacy of the individual, and with the boundedness and fixated
quality of personal identity. By contrast, my friends and acquaintances manifested a sense
of self that seemed interdependent and configured by their various social roles and
identities.
This April 7 entry also marks a stage in my fieldwork where I begin to
tease out patterns and relationships that, prior to this, I had not even considered. For
example, while I could generate all sorts of lists—word association, domains, and
concepts—concerning “personal identity,” I found it difficult to generate a definition of
what I meant by the term. Although I conceptualized social identity as a subset under
personal identity, my actual everyday social experience was the reverse. I became
increasingly aware that my interactions with others were shaped by considerations of
social ties and bonds. My presentation of self stressed those social roles I had in common
with the women I interviewed: daughter, sister, granddaughter, and mother. Moreover, I
acted with extreme caution, knowing as I did that my behavior would reflect on Regina,
her family, and her husband’s family. I began to think about “social identity” as a
particularly dynamic mix of function, reciprocal duties, rights, and obligations that links
individuals and sets the range of action and freedom available to them. Each new
friendship brought additional considerations that I had to incorporate into my everyday
behavioral matrix as a member of the community. What appears above as an off-hand
closing observation—“This is a very intimate personal world”-has developed into the core
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consideration of this dissertation because it presented me with an explicit early marker of
the type of analysis contained herein. It defined the extent of the effort I needed to make
to access the data I sought in the world of Orsogna.
I am aware that I am using what is essentially an eclectic approach. I state
here questions that guided this ethnographic project, so that the relevance o f my analysis,
which follows, may be seen: What do women’s narratives about their experiences during
World War II reveal about their notions of self and identity? How do women—the
Orsognese I worked with—construct such a record of an unprecedented event? What
kinds of insights do the narrators provide about how they made sense of these chaotic
times in which they lived? What are the kinds of realities depicted within the narratives?
What cultural premises are revealed by women’s descriptions and appraisals of themselves
and others? What is the relationship between these cultural premises and the social
structure on the basis of which the community is constituted? As I proceeded two terms,
sociability and relatedness, seemed to emerge as essential components in the dynamics of
the Orsognese creation of community. How did this occur?
Initial Operating Assumptions
Several of my assumptions were obvious at the outset. First, I assumed
that social life and meaning are both produced and reproduced through the participation of
people in their given context rather than determined by some structure existing apart from
them. Second, cultural premises can be conceptualized through the ways people articulate
their experience. We can study notions of “self ’ and “perceptions of relatedness” by
following the discourse through which individuals share world views. I use the term
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“perceptions of relatedness” because the meanings people encode and associate with their
perceptions are a cultural construct. That is to say, such phenomena are always socially
defined. At minimum, to discuss events with another involves the assumption on the part
of the narrator that the listener shares a way of organizing reality, agreement on the
existence of the components central to the composition of this “reality,” and a system of
meaning that encodes significance, thus making narration not only intelligible but also
making it a communicative event. The term “narrativity” refers to the process by which a
person draws upon a cultural schema that enables sense making. One issue concerning
narrativity is the relationship of interdependence between individual interpretation and the
range of meaning that is constituted by the community. Another way to approach
narrativity is to consider Labov and Waletsky’s question; What is the speaker or writer
trying to do in fi'aming this discourse? (Labov and Waletsky 1967).
Third, my projected reliance on narratives assumes an important
relationship between systems of symbolic representation and the organization of
institutions of the social world through which such systems flow. I define culture as a
fi’amework or system of values and beliefs, orientations, and dispositions that people use
to organize and label experience. It includes the rules or principles by which interpersonal
events are perceived and construed. Cultural dispositions or orientations are the basis
upon which participants formulate the meanings and patterns of their own experience as
well as the experiences of others. My fundamental concern became that of determining
how Orsognese women organized their experience in terms of particular categories or
institutions. I conceptualized these categories as the underpinning of a cultural matrix or
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schema that organizes modes of significance that have evolved over time. By the phrase
“modes of significance,” I mean the basic assumptions, the rules, and beliefs that are
shared by the members of a society. The act of narration engages the cultural matrix or
schema, which then imposes a structure on experience. Thus, what people take as “true”
or “normal,” the expectations revealed, or the appraisals made are all manifestations of the
meanings people actively produce in context.
The narratives I recorded were produced in the context of an authentic
matrix, a multidimensional record of lived experiences. They instantiate AlcofFs concept
of positionality. The positional definition creates the identity of women relative to a
constantly shifting context, to a situation that includes a network of elements involving
others, the objective economic conditions, the cultural and political institutions and
ideologies, and so on. If it is possible to identify women by their position within tfiis
network of relations, then it becomes possible to ground a feminist argument for the
position of women as relative and not innate, and yet neither is it “undecidable.” Through
social critique and analysis we can identify women via their position in an existing cultural
and social network (AlcofF 1988). Alcoff goes on to point out that a concept of
positionality provides a determinate though fluid identity of woman that does not fall into
essentialism. “Being a ‘woman’ is to take up a position within a moving historical context
and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how we alter this context”
(Alcoff 1988, 418).
Rather than imposing a structure for analysis, I used my fieldwork as a
means of discovery and as a basis for re-evaluating what had become the conventional way
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of thinking about women and power in Italian society. I focused on what was written or
said, on the meanings inscribed as a narrator construed a series of events. What sense did
the narrator make of specific events and what domains of cultural knowledge informed her
“sense-making activity?”
PART n. The Battle For Orsogna
Someone said to me a few days ago that the Italians are really decent people and that if we treat them properly they will come over to us. I disagree with him. Our job is to kill them. That is what we have to do. Once we have killed them then we can see if they are good fellows or not. But they must be killed first.
General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery
By February 1943, confronted by the dissatisfaction stemming fi'om the
loss of empire, the threat of invasion, and the inability of the Italian government or its
allies to defend Italian cities from Allied air attacks, Mussolini attempted to produce the
resurgence that was needed for him to retain control of the state. More importantly, for
the first time there was active dissent within the Fascist party that would ultimately lead to
the downfall of Mussolini and the fascist system. At a meeting of the Fascist Grand
Council held on July 24-25, the opponents carried a motion against him which made it
easier for the King to remove Mussolini as Italy’s leader, arrest him, and appoint Marshall
Pietro Badoglio as head of the new provisional Government. Although Badoglio
promised the Germans the Italians would continue the war, he and his government did
almost everything “as stupidly and slowly as possible” (Weinberg 1994, 597). They did
not even conceal or guard Mussolini effectively, and in September [1943] he was rescued
by a German airborne operation and subsequently installed by the Germans as a puppet in
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northern Italy” (Weinberg 1994, 598). Badoglio attempted to negotiate an alliance with
the Allies without first surrendering. Churchill, however, strongly opposed any
accommodation made to the Badoglio government; he demanded nothing less than
unconditional surrender.
In the meantime. Field Marshall Kesserling, certain that Italy would
surrender and join the Allies, took advantage of the confusion and obtained important
access in areas occupied by the Italian army, including Abruzzo. Following his recall of
Field Marshall Rommel from Salonika on July 26, 1943, Field Marshall Kesserling moved
quickly to contain the potential risks entailed in Italy’s inevitable defection by deploying a
second army in Italy. Elite SS units were moved firom the Eastern front to Abruzzo and
other areas in central Italy. The German garrisons of Corsica and Sardinia were
transferred to the mainland and stationed in Abruzzo and Molise—i.e., the northern part of
southern Italy. Because of Orsogna’s strategic advantage, an elite corps of SS troops and
Rommel’s panzer division were deployed in and around Orsogna and in the area between
Orsogna and Ortona.
When the first bombs fell on Orsogna in September 1943, Italy had already
surrendered to the Allies. Difficulties encountered by the British Eighth Army, as well as
those faced at landing in Calabria and Salerno, were due to the German build-up of
defense forces and fortifications that occurred between July and September 1943. The
Orsognese, like most other rural Italians, thought the war had ended with the fall of
Mussolini and the armistice signed by Badoglio’s government.
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From November 1943 to June 1944, Orsogna marked the front separating
two formidable armies: the British Eighth Army and the German 65* Infantry Division and
26* Panzer Division. Military historian Neville Phillips describes the battle of Orsogna as
“an obsessive frustration, a slayer of expectations, a demon of obduracy, a Stalingrad of
the Abruzzo” (Phillips 1946, 87). Second only to the Allied attack on Monte Cassino in
its ferocity and destruction, the battle for Orsogna left the Orsognese desolate.
Orsogna was the essential lynch-pin of the German Winterstellung.
Orsogna afforded many advantages to the German infantry and panzer divisions that had
been charged with holding it at all costs. It was considered, and proved to be,
impenetrable by frontal attack; its high ground facilitated both defensive and offensive
operations and its many caves, cliffs, and ridges provided ample cover for counter-attack.
Phillips describes the formidable obstacles encountered by the British Eighth Army in
November 1943:
Orsogna stands on the highest of the parallel ridges that separate the streams draining the Maiella massif. East and north, successive ridges converge on it; to the immediate south the gray stone buildings seem poised on a sheer cliff and barely stand aside to admit entry; while southward towards Melon the country is for mechanized troops hopelessly wild and gashed by gullies. Strategically, it commands the road south-west to Melone, itself a strong outpost for Guardiagrele, and the same road goes north-east to Ortona, behind the Moro River. Firmly held, it becomes a hinge on which a defensive line, like a door, may swing back as far as the sea from one obstacle to the next, river and ridge, river and ridge. (Phillips 1946, 86)
In the history of the war in Abruzzo, the name Orsogna, along with
Sangro, and Ortona, evokes the same significance accorded to Leningrad and Stalingrad
on the Russian front. The critical nature of the contest for Orsogna is illustrated by its
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constant mention in the war bulletins of the two armies for almost seven months. The
Germans, who had endured many setbacks, drew particular satisfaction from their
successful resistance in Orsogna; they were proud of it and reference to Orsogna was
often cited in their bulletins, which glorified the spirit of self-sacrifice of German soldiers.
The battle for Orsogna, therefore, served as a focus for an important propaganda effort at
a moment when the opposing sides were both tired and dejected. The battles for Sangro
Valley, and Ortona were brutal; fighting between the Germans and British Eighth Army
began with relentless Allied bombardments by sea artillery and air, followed by the
advance of tanks and infantry, and eventually resulting in hand-to-hand combat. But in
each case, the fighting ended within two weeks. The battle for Orsogna lasted for eight
months.
In November 1943, the Allied plan called for the British Eighth Army to
press north to the Pescara River and then swing southwest along the route to Avezzano to
attack enemy communications, while the Fifth Army broke through the winter line at
Cassino before moving up the Liri Valley. Finally, an amphibious assault from Anzio
would allow the three thrusts to converge and descend on Rome. German military
resistance was tenacious. The Germans were aware that if they were unable to defeat the
Allied forces along the Adriatic, the defensive line of Central Italy would be vulnerable and
the defenses of Rome would be in danger of being outflanked.
The divisions comprising the British Eighth Army were drawn from the
commonwealth; Canada, India, and New Zealand. Eighth Army commander General Sir
Bernard L. Montgomery ordered the New Zealand Division of the British Eighth Army
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into the Sangro line south of Orsogna on November 14, 1943. According to reports, the
New Zealand Forces had developed, during the North African Campaign, a reputation for
possessing an “almost arrogant” conviction of invincibility, a fierce independence, and a
tenacity in battle that was legendary. It was explained that since these soldiers came from
small, closely knit communities, any individual’s disgrace in battle became a domestic
scandal (Nativiol983).
With their left flank protected by the 13* Corps, the New Zealand Division
faced a river valley almost three kilometers wide and behind it a steep slope climbing
approximately 400 meters to the Sangro ridge. On November 27, the New Zealanders
began their attack by crossing the Sangro river, which ran neck deep and when in flood
moved at 25 knots. They began their ascent to Guardiagrele (approximately eight
kilometers southwest of Orsogna) by climbing up the sheer cliffs leading into the town.
Two days later, unchallenged by the German forces, protected by Allied air raids and
artillery, the New Zealand brigade occupied and was in control of the ridge that formed
part of the fortified German winter line. In view of the Allied success, the German 10*
Army withdrew from Castelfrantano, the next intermediate point before Orsogna. Though
elaborate defensive works had made Castelfrantano appear a “veritable bastion” of the
German winter line, it was easily taken by the New Zealand brigade.
Encouraged by their easy victory and by the absence of the expected
German resistance, the British Eighth Army command had reason to expect to take
Orsogna the following day. Once they secured Orsogna for the Allies, their ultimate
objective—control of the lateral Pescara-Rome highway—would be attained before
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Christmas. On December 2, the New Zealand battalions were approximately three or four
kilometers away from Orsogna. Because of their recent success, Montgomery and
Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand armored brigade, treated Orsogna as a mere
intermediate objective on the way to Rome.
During their withdrawal from Castelfrantano, the German 65* Infantry
Division and 26* Panzer Division were inadvertently separated, opening a fissure in the
German line. Whether or not the New Zealand forces could have taken and held Orsogna
had they attacked immediately is still an issue of contention among Anglo-American and
Italian military historians. However, the British Eighth Army command ordered the
division to wait for ten hours.
When the New Zealand brigade then advanced to the edge of Orsogna and
moved forward to the center of the Piazza, the Germans, who had used the delay to
regroup, hit back with tanks and infantry, pushing the New Zealanders back. The German
65* Infantry and 26* Panzer Division held firm in Orsogna and would continue to do so
for the next six months.
The first attack on December 2 was frontal and began under the advantage
of night. The assault went well for the Allied forces until they reached the first few houses
of Orsogna. German tanks, hidden behind a hill, moved forward, launching a violent
attack. The New Zealanders slowly retreated and regrouped in Castelfrantano.
Montgomery’s original plan, devised to take advantage of the initial Eighth
Army success, included capturing Orsogna and the other small towns between the foot of
the Maiella and Chieti. The German command immediately realized the danger its troops
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were in and took action to reinforce their military positions. Kesserling quickly deployed
infantry reinforcements from Venice and Ancona. He ordered German paratroops into the
line, fortifications built, and the strengthening of anti-tank defenses.
The Allied troops, still holding firm in Guardiagrele, launched a second
assault on Orsogna on December 7. Abandoning a frontal attack, Montgomery ordered a
two-brigade pincer movement on the town. The German counter-attack was fierce. Once
again, the outcome was a stalemate and the New Zealanders withdrew. Orsogna was
almost divided in two: the British Eighth Army held the cemetery and its environs while
the Germans were scattered among the ruins of the houses along the Piazza and beyond.
For weeks, during the daytime the hostile activity was minor, but at night the patrols
fought in brief and furious battles.
Bombardment by both artillery and air was relentless. Dresden-like air
raids over Orsogna and nearby villages continued through the month of December. The
SS made a documentary film about the air raids on Orsogna carried out by the British
Desert Air Force, whose exploits in North Africa were legendary. The film was circulated
in the Italian movie theaters to demonstrate the horrific damage the Allies were inflicting
on fellow Italians (Di Tullio 1984).
On December 23, while the battle raged in the streets of Ortona, Allied and
German artillery exchanged fire between Orsogna and Poggiofiorito. The New Zealanders
launched a third relentless attack that would continue until New Year’s Eve. This time,
the Germans reacted even more tenaciously and aggressively than they had before, with
the result that in Orsogna, the war seemed to have assumed the characteristics of the static
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and exhausting battles fought in the trenches during the First World War. In the final
hours of 1943, a blizzard blew out of the mountains, developing into one of the heaviest
snowfalls in living memory. Freyberg wrote in his diary that the snow “stops things all
right” and with resignation admitted that “Tsar Nicholas’s best officer. General January
was now in command” (Phillips 1984, 88).
In the winter of 1944, warfare consisted of silent watch, patrols, spasmodic
exchange of gunfire, and hand-to-hand combat. The Allied objectives—the capture of
Orsogna and Chieti; the opening of the Ortona Road; the advance through Avezzano to
junction with the British Fifth Army; and the final advance to Rome—would not be
attained until the beginning of June 1944. The exchange of ground gained and lost by the
opposing forces was measured by meters. From the mouth of the Sangro river, where the
battle for Orsogna began on November 27, 1943, to Orsogna is a distance of 17
kilometers. From November 27 to December 31, the British Eighth Army advanced at the
rate of approximately 0.6 kilometers per day. On December 21, while the battle raged in
Orsogna, Bernard Berenson, sitting in his study in Florence, wrote in his diary;
The Allies are fighting in the Abruzzi for ditches, for crumbling slopes, for precipices, for crags, or merely marking time. Meanwhile, people in the Italy occupied by the Germans, and their bootlickers the neo-Mussolinians, are losing faith in the Allies, doubting whether they ever will come, and drifting towards a sort of reconciliation with their former masters, hoping that these will turn out no worse than they were previously. It will take great events to justify the Allied campaign in Southern Italy. At present they seem to be fulfilling the prophecy of Churchill, when he spoke of what it would be if they had to conquer Italy inch by inch. (Berenson 1952, 185)
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Orsogna in Perspective: War Time
It is characteristic of the Orsognese I encountered to distinguish between
the presence of German forces and the beginning of the war. World War II began for the
Orsognese—and, in general, for most Italians—when their community or city first
experienced offensive Allied bombing. The presence of German soldiers preceded Allied
offensive attacks. The Orsognese refer to their presence within the community as the
period of occupation. This distinction is based on a series of events that followed the fall
of Mussolini and the ambiguity that ensued regarding not only Italy’s status but also the
status of Italian soldiers and civilians.
The siege of Orsogna ended June 8, 1944. The front moved north. Of
those who re-entered Orsogna, 95 per cent were affected with hepatitis, meningitis, or
typhus. There were hundreds dead and thousands wounded, the traumatized, the ill, those
who had lost hope; the entire population was without destination, without protection,
without shelter, without acceptable forms of organized assistance.
The Orsognese have devised a chronology of the war that is based on the
extent to which their daily life was “normal.” The first stage begins in late August 1943
and ends in early November 1943. Although Orsogna’s first air attack occurred in early
September, air attacks were infrequent until mid-November. The German SS command in
Orsogna first ordered evacuation in September, but at that time, it was not taken seriously
by either the Orsognese or the Germans, who relied on townspeople to provide them with
provisions. From the high ridges around Orsogna, the Orsognese could witness the very
visible marks of battle taking place in Ortona. Too far fi-om the sea to be threatened by
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naval artillery, the Orsognese assumed the war was “out there.” During my fieldwork, I
met a woman who told me about an incident that occurred in late August 1943, as she and
her grandmother were walking to the family’s olive grove. On the way they encountered
the incoming SS division. Her grandmother approached the SS commander and told him
to go somewhere else. She told him that this was harvest season and that no Orsognese
had time for war.
The evacuation of Orsogna marks the second stage in the Orsognese
chronology of World War II. This includes the period of diaspora when the Orsognese
were scattered in the countryside, hovered in caves, or were deported either to the north
or south, depending on which side held them as prisoners. Forced evacuation began in
Orsogna in November 1943 and continued during the Allied offensive in the beginning of
December. Evacuation was still in progress during the weeks between the Allied second
attack on Orsogna on December 7 and Christmas Eve. Evacuation continued throughout
the Christmas-New Year’s Eve offensive. The second stage ended on June 8, 1944, when
the British Eighth Army captured Orsogna. So far as the Orsognese were concerned, the
war ended on June 8, 1944, the day the British Eighth Army finally secured control of
Orsogna.
When it became obvious to the German command in Orsogna that the
British Eighth Army, having already successfully taken Guardiagrele, intended to press
their march and secure Orsogna, evacuation was strictly enforced in a manner that was
fierce. Signora A recalls the fear, the anxiety, and the desolation she and other Orsognese
experienced:
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Narrative, Signora A
The first few days of the unforgettable November 1943. Nobody will be capable of describing the pain, the mood, the desperation, the sense of anguish, the consternation felt at that tim e.. .. Old people, children, sick, disabled who left their house, the small town to venture towards the unknown, hunted by the German troops who pushed them, under the constant threat of the airplanes in formation or in dividing tearful soul and flesh, with the rattling of the machine guns, the roaring o f the cannons which spread death. It seemed to be part of one of the great biblical exoduses or deportations, which to us appear unreal and imaginary because they happened so far back in time but that were now becoming a frightening reality. Even nature and the surroundings gave a sensation of squalor and desolation.
One went around in confusion without a destination, in any way possible, on foot, passing over destruction, with a glassy and gloomy look, which reflects the dreadful tragedy. One went around drifting over land devastated with empty houses on fire or tom, on broken roads, obstructed by tanks and destroyed vehicles, marked by crosses in memory of the dead buried in hurry during the hard journey. One advanced like sheep without a shepherd, like stray dogs, like lambs on the way to the slaughter house, followed by the excruciating moan of the injured and the old, whom one was forced to abandon without the slightest hope to meet again. One went .. . but where? One w ent. . . but why? Passing thoughtfully by the cemetery one stopped for a while to say a prayer and one placed trust in the poor deceased left alone, to guard our houses, our possessions, our meager wealth.
Evacuation was very dangerous since the German troops were
simultaneously placing mines in the roads and on the trails the Orsognese would take as
they moved either into the countryside or north to Chieti, where an internment camp had
been established by the Germans. In addition, many of the evacuees sought safety in the
caves along the mountain ridge on which Orsogna stands. What some thought safe in
November became their tombs in December, for the caves were in the direct line of fire
fi’om Allied artillery.
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By mid-November, the Orsognese had already endured hardship, famine,
anguish, and death. Slowly the residents of Orsogna dispersed. Dr. SUveri, a local
historian and playwright wrote:
Many were successful in crossing the lines o f the war front and in seeking refuge among the Allied troops [in Guardiagrele and Arialli]. The Allies sent them to refugee camps and then onward to other camps in Bari, Brindisi and Taranto where they stayed until the month of June 1944. Others, the majority, were taken prisoners by the Germans and forced to march to [internment] camps in Chieti where, those who arrived in Chieti, were placed on freight trains and sent to the provinces of Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia and Pavia (SUveri 1989,46)
As will be seen in the narratives discussed in Chapter 4, many of the
Orsognese who were forced to march to Chieti escaped and took refuge in the
countryside. Until June 1944, Orsogna remained the unconquerable stronghold sought by
the Allied troops coming from the south. The population, forced to seek shelter in the
countryside nearby to hide from the Germans and to escape from the air-raids and the
constant bombardments, took refuge in existing caves or in caves purposefully dug out.
Dr. SUveri describes Orsogna as it was in December 1944;
La citta (Orsogna) non esiste piu, tutto e ravina. Le casse, I palazzi a destra e a sinistra del grande vialone che I ’attraversa sono tnttti gia sgretolati, smozzicati: le macerie ingombrano tutta la strada, tutti I cinquanta metri di larghezza: per passare non c 'e che una viottola. In qualche punto le facciate sono ancora ritte, in piedi, ma dietro c 'e il vuoto: le cannonate, arrivando dalla parte di Ortona e dalla parte del fitime Moro, prendevano d 'infilata le abitazioni. Poi c 'e stato il maciullamente del quadrimotori.... Poi la gente e tomata a poco a poco, aitcora oggi vive nelle grotte, nelle cantine, come troglodoti senza aititi, senza cure.
The town (Orsogna), however no longer exists, it is all in ruins. The houses, the buUdings to the right and left of the main broad avenue which crosses it [the town of Orsogna] are all shattered, all in pieces: the whole
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road is obstructed by debris, all fifty meters of its width; not even a narrow lane to pass through. In some places the front of the houses is still upright, standing, but behind there is nothing: the barrages, which arrived from the direction of Ortona, and from the direction of the river Moro, enfiladed the houses. Afterwards there was the pulverization by four-engine aircraft.. . . Then, gradually, the population returned, today it still lives in caves, cellars, like troglodytes without aid, and without assistance. (Silveri 1989, 43).
Between June 1944 and April 1945, more than 350 Orsognese had been
killed by mines. When the town was liberated, nearly twice that number had been
wounded by explosions. Calculations made by Captain Spampanato, commander of the
mine-sweeper squad assigned to Orsogna in September 1944, indicated that over half a
million mines had been planted in the 17 kilometers of roads between Orsogna and
Ortona. It was a daily occurrence for a person or persons or a wagon to be blown up by
mines.
During the summer of 1944, the evacuees from nearby areas and refugees
from Southern Italy began to return to Orsogna, or what was left of Orsogna. The others,
those Orsognese who had been sent north by the Germans, returned in the summer of
1946. After nine or ten months of absolute silence, communications with relatives and
friends of residents abroad resumed. In September 1945, fifteen months after the British
Eighth Army, under the command of Viscount Montgomery, had occupied Orsogna, a
correspondent for the newspaper, Sabato del Lombrado, Milano, described for his readers
what he witnessed in Orsogna:
Ma Orsogna e solo un fantastico scenario di rovine. d o che e rimasto in piedi fa pensare a un coro di vite lacere, che canti e gema it proprio strazio alVimpassibile azzurro. Coro di morti e di superstiti, che dice: Ecco la guerra ed ecco I ’innocenza .... Dovunque la guerra ha lasciato muri che chiudono tratti di pavimento, la miseria si rannicchia e sembra
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che it principio reagisca alia condanna della fine. Simili, gli uomini, a questi tronchi schiantati che rimangono ancora abbarbicati alia terra e rinnovatto rami e rinverdiscono le foglie. (da «Sabato del Lombardo» Milano, settembre 1945, pagina 6)
But Orsogna is only an unreal landscape of ruins. The part that still remains standing evokes a chorus of tom lives, which sings and laments its agony to the impassive blue sky. A chorus of dead and survivors, laments: Here is the war and here is the innocence.. . . Everywhere the war has left walls surrounding sections of floors, poverty crouches here and it seems as if one’s principle reaction is to be condemned to the beginning of the end. Human beings are similar to tom tree trunks which still cling to the soil and grow new branches and revive with new green leaves.
Orsogna in Perspective: This Study
The practice of anthropology inevitably places us elsewhere, where we
cannot be at home. Being elsewhere required that I manifest less a passive receptivity to
the social world and more an active engagement with those structures that both constitute
and are constitutive of social life. Every situation, every site, every context in
anthropological inquiry is different. Yet, all situations of anthropological inquiry require
that the researcher pose hard questions about the relationship between the meanings
encountered or derived and the organization of everyday life, about the relationship
between the nature and methods of research, and about our responses to both. The
meaning of the term fieldwork has become so encompassing that it has come to convey
nearly every aspect of anthropological inquiry. I prefer to use the term “practice” because
it permits me to frame the subject of this chapter, which is the processural aspect of
anthropological inquiry as I encountered it during the course of my research. That is, as I
undertook my investigation of women’s meaning making, process and meaning were
revealed as inextricably related.
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Unlike the chemist in the laboratory whose inquiry follows hard-and-fast
rules of procedure, the anthropologist who attempts to grasp the organization of meaning
and material life in her or his particular elsewhere can resort to no such rules. A
discussion of process and discovery by a chemist is characterized by matching methods
appropriate to desired outcomes. For the anthropologist, by contrast, conversation about
process and discovery would be very different. Our craft is sense making and our stance
requires a sense of the puzzle: we explicate a phenomenon so as to translate between
different meaning systems. Regardless of the various ways in which a particular
phenomenon of culture in Orsogna might be examined, it seems to me that how I came to
understand what these experiences meant to Orsognese women and why these meanings
had significance for them defines the core of my practice.
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ON ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE
Introduction
In any ethnographic project, theory and method shape each other in a
continual dialogue and cannot be separated nor taken out of their historical social context.
One does not do research in the field without some idea of what one is looking for and
hopes to find. I entered Orsogna with an assortment of needling questions about how
Orsognese women did, and do, construe their experiences of World War II. My objective
was, and remains, to understand the significance of such an important event—living within
a war—and to learn how Orsognese women made sense of their experience. I focus on
testimony in the form of personal narratives, written and verbal, in order to gain a
perception of the process by which a traumatic historical event is culturally apprehended
by women in ways that constitute and reflect sociocultural perspectives.
Theoretical Considerations
A vast historiography exists on the many aspects of the German occupation
and the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II. Yet we know remarkably little about
what ordinary women and men thought and felt. It is not surprising that ordinary women
are almost completely absent fi’om this historiography.
31
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Since traditional history presumes that women are absent from the fields of
war, it follows that women have no story to tell. Feminist research across the social
sciences has made it evident that the mere fact of being a woman meant having a particular
kind of social, and, hence, historical experience(Lemer 1975; Geiger 1990). In the
historical accounts of the war in Italy, particularly in the region of the Abruzzo, women
are inscribed through their absence, but this absence is here noted and interrogated.
Kelly and Scott call for a re-thinking of traditional history (Kelly 1987;
Scott 1987). I am particularly drawn to Kelly’s perspective—that events seen from a
women's standpoint give a wholly different character or meaning to a period or event we
thought we knew and, more importantly, have uncritically accepted as truth, or the
“truthful” representation of reality—because understanding of received traditional history is
enhanced when we consider the event in light of women’s experiences. The aim of
anthropology as cultural critique is achieved because what is discovered about the events
or period makes evident the cultural assumptions that structure a cultural representation of
“historical facts.” We learn, for example, that traditionalist accounts of World War II
have been constructed in conformity with post-war hegemonic ideology.
What little we may know about the lives of Italian women during the war
comes mostly from scenarios depicted in films and newsreels at the time, or by flipping
through illustrated magazines and memoirs. One particular scenario, common to
documentary media as well as to docu-drama, has a special resonance for me. In it Italian
women are shown relegated to the sidewalks—metaphorically, on the margins of history-
welcoming the advancing armies, while men, particularly those in uniform, claim the
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middle of the street and thus become, metaphorically, the embodiment of history at large.
Some women are not even allowed to claim the sidewalk.
Prevalent notions of gender reveal implicit evaluative beliefs about the
distinction between knowledge and subjectivity. To propose that the gender of the
knower is significant draws attention to the correspondence, on the one hand, between
men and knowledge and, on the other hand, between women and experience. This
distinction has profound implications with regard to issues of power. For example,
whereas the authority of doctors stems fi’om their “knowledge,” nurses are perceived as
subordinate to doctors because their authority stems from “experience” with patients. A
value distinction is made between knowledge and experience that not only regards
knowledge as more prestigious than experience but, more importantly, confers greater
authority on knowledge than it does on experience.
The conventions of the genre in which historians have written the history of
World War n create the illusion that only soldiers “know” war and imply that a different
kind of experience exists for those lumped in the category of “civilians.” For this to be
grasped, it is necessary to recall that the representation of World War II has been
transmitted to subsequent generations through the received word of written texts. The
categories that organize the text and the tenor of discourse are rooted in sexism and class.
The advent of television and its representation of war, beginning with the Vietnam war,
has dispelled some myths and created others, such as the possibility of “surgical”
bombing, evident in Desert Storm. Until their recent inclusion in the post-Vietnam
literature, the personal experiences of women during war claimed only limited cognitive
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authority and, as such, are marginalized in the historical accounts of World War II as
“private memory,” “subjective,” and, thus, “not authentic.” Women’s personal
experiences were not absent as a result of oversight, but had been trivialized or reduced to
the status of description by dominant positivist research traditions institutionalized in
academic and scientific disciplines. I agree with Scott’s statement that “women’s
experience, when contrasted with official pronouncements on the meaning of war,
provides insight not only into the discrepancy between domestic, private history and
official, national history, but also (and more important) a means of analyzing how and by
whom national memory is constructed” (Scott 1988).
Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that much of what constitutes the
“truth” of the historiography of World War II is national history—nation-making history—
which projects the belief that national concerns define local issues. In Italy, the
historiography of World War II is the reverse; locality-based history constitutes the
building blocks of national or state history and historians must account for the
“dependency” of national history upon local histories (Herzfeld 1987a). In the past,
anthropologists have distinguished themselves fi'om historians by their “compelling sense
of place”: locality provides the capability of observing relations (Sabean 1990,10). As an
anthropologist, I am far more interested in what narrators have to say, as an indication of
the cultural construction that is meaningful in the present to those interpreting their own
past than I am in what “really happened.” It is in this regard that I find the Orsognese
concept of sociability to be an important element in their cultural ontological orientation.
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While my research is rooted in Orsogna, it is not my intent to reify the
locality by making it synonymous with community. Much of the discussion in Chapter 3
and the analysis in Chapter 4 are based on my contention that community is much more an
ideological construct than it is a place, a locality. Orsogna is not an object of analysis;
rather, it is a flexible context for the analysis of meaning. The narratives interest me
because they indicate how the women appropriate events to form ait ideology that in a
variety o f ways both defines andframes their perception o f an unprecedented event. In
this instance, the written narratives collected by the Commune municipo d'Orsogna and
the local history written by Dr. Silveri proved to be indispensable guides in the writing of
this dissertation. There is a dialectical relationship between the event as a “social drama”
(in Turner's sense of the term) and the stories told about them (Turner 1974). Women
have constructed the events in a culturally meaningful way. The narratives formed also
selectively appropriate an event. Just as these narratives provide an ideological framework
that reflects behavior, they may also serve as models for and of history.
It is my profound conviction that endeavors in historical anthropology such
as my research must be based in part on a critical awareness of how the past is being
conceptualized. An anthropologist looks not only at the context as does the historian, but
at the interactional and situational dimensions of the human beings involved, which is why
participant observation was critical in my research(Spradley 1980). It enabled me to come
to know and understand the context of orientations and dispositions that permeate the
community. It authorized me to inquire how what was said in the narratives connect
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social processes. Ultimately, the adequacy of any interpretation depends upon the
descriptions of social processes that configure the phenomena under consideration.
The purpose of this study was not to record history for history's sake.
Versions of the past take on a particular configuration generation to generation. This
applies to the Orsognese as well as to other social groups. Also, I expected a high degree
of selectivity in what was remembered, ignored, or forgotten. I assumed that people
explain the past to themselves in an effort to create a fit with which they can live. I refer
to women's narrative as a component of “local history,” (Herzfeld 1987) by which I mean
that the narratives contain in structure an ideology o f social orientation—the “symbolic
dialogue” Sahlins refers to between received categories (or cultural repertoire) and
perceived context, between the cultural code and practical reference (Sahlins 1981). In
this regard, the women’s narratives reveal norms, values, and social identities that are not
only manifested in social experience but are also internalized in symbolic form. Symbols
provide a link between the constraining realities of social life and the moral preference of
individuals. They transform the adaptive “must” into the moral “ought” (Cohen 1985).
Participant Observation
Participant observation—seeking to understand what people were thinking
and doing—was an on-going activity. I used every-day encounters and participation in
family life to grasp how members of the community construed their experience. Initially, I
lived with Regina and her family. Within a month, I rented an apartment owned by
Signora F, who became a dear friend and advisor. I have retrospectively defined a
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fieldwork chronology, which I organize as three separate phases, each of approximately
three months duration.
The first three months were devoted to gathering written narratives,
interviewing Dr. Silveri, a local writer and historian of Orsogna, who suggested names of
women I might want to interview. I spent time with Regina in her store, since this was a
very helpful way to meet women and for women to meet me. Usually, they would invite
me to visit them at their homes where I would invariably meet other relatives who would
introduce me to other women. Regina owned a women's and men's clothing store that had
an extensive stock. Her customers ranged across the socioeconomic and age groups
found in the community so I had access to a representative class sample. Besides clothing,
stock in Regina’s store included knitting and crochet supplies, which drew women
customers, especially the elderly. Generally, after opening their stores in the morning,
nearby women proprietors would convene in Regina’s store for some morning coffee.
This was another opportunity to expand my network of potential interviewees. I also
traveled to L’Aquila and Rome, primarily to locate archival documents and collections of
written narratives. L’Aquila is the regional capital of the Abruzzo and the site for the
Organo Delllstituto Abruzzese Per La Storia D'ltalia Dal Fascismo Alla Resistenza, which
publishes Rivista Abruzzese di Studi Storici dal fascismo alia Resistenza, ajournai series
that includes articles and detailed interviews about the war in the Abruzzo and personal
experiences. Thus, the first phase of fieldwork was devoted to identifying a network and
building relationships with women and their families.
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During the second phase of fieldwork, I continued to gather archival data,
but most of the time was focused on working out an approach for conducting interviews.
Two comments need to be made about this process: first, in one sense, I began participant
observation as soon as I arrived in Orsogna. Also, soon after I arrived, I began meeting
with women who had either requested that I visit them or were gracious enough to grant
my request to talk to them. Normally referred to in the literature as “settling-in” or
“getting acquainted,” I found the initial period of fieldwork to be an intense learning
period, a period of building contexts less about wAa/ / u/»—anthropologist, researcher—
and more about who. Second, I was actively aware of noticing cultural differences, subtle
and dramatic, in the way I experienced the flow of everyday life. Anthropologists are
always indivisible from what they study and stand in definite relationship to it. Built into
the positivist approach that shaped the discipline well through the twentieth century was
the myth that somehow we stood outside. In my first phase of research, I had no choice
but to confront that myth. I discuss this and other related issues in the next chapter.
Suffice it to say here that the position of the anthropologist as translator between different
cultural meaning systems is a major thread in the tapestry I weave throughout this
document.
Finally, the third phase of fieldwork was a time of intensive interviews. It
was also a time when I began to draw connections between concepts and ideas that
seemed dominant in the women's narratives and in the social practices I encountered and
observed in daily life. I became consciously aware of how the narrator's‘T ’ only becomes
a n ‘T’ in a community of other selves who are also‘T ’ for every act of self-reference.
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There is simultaneously a uniqueness and difference of the self, as well as commonality
among selves (Kondo 1986). The narrator, therefore, is not merely the teller, someone to
whom an event has happened, or someone who has information about an event.
I used everyday encounters and my observation of the components and
rituals that comprised Orsognese life as a basis for determining how members of the
community construed their experience. I began my research with the idea that fieldwork
was a matter of activities and tasks; at the end, I came to appreciate fieldwork as a
nuancedprocess. Fieldwork demanded from me a willingness to use my own reactions to
people and situations as a guide. I paid attention to the disorientation and dissonance I
felt in the early weeks o ffieldwork. I examined the meanings I attached to events or
interactions, the assumptions I had originally made, and the categories I used to interpret
the situations encountered during this period.
Participant observation involves translating what things mean in one culture
to members of another culture. However, the translation process is not automatic. It
depends upon fieldwork to acknowledge fully the thought process by which an
anthropologist orders and interprets the flow of experience. / had to bring to the
foreground my own cultural assumptions before I could hope to hear and understand what
those in another culture were expressing. It occurred to me that “arrival” in a community
was not equivalent to “entry”; the former defines an activity, a physical presence, while the
latter requires engagement. Engagement in the fieldwork does not refer merely to
gathering data; it involves learning something about the ways the community constructs
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meaning. As a participant in the community, I had to consider alternative viewpoints as
well as question the beliefs underlying my most immediate interpretations.
An epiphanal experience early during the first phase of fieldwork was the
sudden realization that there are no neat beginnings or endings involved in participant
observation. I was not a neutral, passive observer and recorder of situations, events, and
activities. I came to understand participant observation as a creative act—a process that
consisted of selectively noticing some things and not noticing others.
Checking the Passage of the Participant Observer
It soon became evident to me that grasping situated meanings—the
“grammar” of Orsognese social life—was an on-going process of learning and revising
what I thought I understood. For example, soon after my arrival in January 1990,1
noticed that while men would linger in the Piazza, women did not. In addition, some of
the elderly men, who installed themselves in the same fixed locations day after day, were
referred to, by the Orsognese, as maintaining their post. On the other hand, I observed
that while women might stop to engage in brief conversation, these exchanges were brief,
often hurried, with a quick resumption of pace toward their ultimate destination. This
relation of gender and space was replicated in the local bars or coffee house. Once again,
men lingered upon finishing their coffee and women moved on. In this case, there
appeared to be an interesting variable: if the coffee house fi-onted the Piazza, the relation
between space and gender held firm. On the other hand, when the bar was situated on the
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spur of the Piazza, along the alley-ways leading to it, women would linger and chat with
other women in their group or with the owner.
I based my immediate interpretation of this phenomenon on the concept of
separate spheres that at the time seemed to me unproblematic. That is to say, I thought I
“read” the social text by using a code of meaning I assumed configured the phenomena I
observed. Once aware of how I “read” the social action and why I read it in that
particular way, I recognized that identifying and comprehending situated meanings would
prove to be more complex than I had anticipated.
If I unconsciously apply them as an interpretive device, I also impose on
the phenomena observed an interpretation, a significance laden with meaning from another
cultural system. Furthermore, I did not allow for various configurations of elements that
combined to form the phenomena I observed. What I did not know at the time was that
the men I observed were pensioners. To linger in the Piazza at one's post communicated—
among other messages—men's liberation from obligatory labor. Perhaps most important,
neither did I entertain the possibility of differences concerning the cultural meanings at
play in what I observed nor did I permit myself the admission that I really had no basis for
understanding what was going on since so much of Orsognese life was still unknown.
Thus, I recognized that I was “reading” the social scene as if I already understood it. If
that were the case, then why remain in Orsogna? Because of this experience, I began to
treat whatever it was that I thought I understood as a learning opportunity. By
monitoring my own reactions to people and situations, I became aware of the meanings
and the assumptions that underlay my interpretations.
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These combined practices proved useful because it made me conscious of
the concepts and beliefs I was employing to frame and interpret my observations. For
example, I habitually referred to, and thought of, Orsogna as a physical site, a bounded
area, that provided a setting for social life. Consequently, in recording my observations, I
treated space and physical settings as backdrops for social interaction. My attention was
drawn to this during the Good Friday procession in which a statue of the crucified Christ,
reposing in an open glass coffin, and a statue of the Black Madonna, his grieving Mother,
are carried from the church through the Piazza and to the alleys off the Piazza. The
procession re-enters the Piazza and returns to the church. On Good Friday, I followed the
path of the procession with camera in hand. As the procession progressed along its
traditional route, I would be in a better position to photograph the various groups and the
religious icons being carried by the celebrants. One icon drew my attention. It was a
wooden cock, which symbolized the rooster that crowed after Peter had thrice denied his
apostleship to Christ. As I walked parallel to the procession, I grew more and more
hesitant about taking photographs. I sensed a disparity between my “reading” of the
procession as activity, setting, and event and the way the Orsognese experienced the
procession, as a sacred event. In retrospect, I think my intuitive sense was a reaction to
several clues that in combination caused me to re-think whether taking photographs was
appropriate. What I observed as settings for the procession—static, neutral space and
buildings as backdrops for the social event—the Orsognese seemed to experience more
holistically; as social constructs that simultaneously constrained and extended possibilities
in which the Orsognese both produced and reproduced social interaction. I refrained from
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taking photographs of the Good Friday procession because it seemed to me that, among
the various symbolic messages conveyed by the procession, the public display of the dead
Christ symbolically transformed the Orsognese to witnesses on the hill at Calvary.
Though familiar with Catholic holy week rituals within the Italian-American community in
which I had grown up, I had never before seen a figure representing the dead Christ placed
in a glass, open coffin covered by a sheer white cloth. Another indicator was the inclusion
of the Black Madonna and the route followed by the procession. On the Tuesday after
Easter Sunday, the Black Madorma is transformed into the Madonna of Refuge, who is the
patroness of Orsogna. The Tuesday celebration included the performance of the Tableau
(scenes from the Bible are staged now on flatbed trucks but in the past were presented on
wide platforms made of wood carried on men's shoulders). Each tableau has a beam
extending from the rear of the tableau perpendicular to the flatbed to a height of
approximately two stories. Supported on a small platform attached near the top of each
beam stands a little girl dressed to represent the Madonna.
The route of the Tuesday procession is precisely the same route as that
used for the Good Friday procession. Both processions make a circular path marking the
boundaiy of the hub of the town. In the on-going process of participant observation, I
learned that the route followed on Good Friday is also the route taken for funeral
processions. It seemed to me that the route symbolically marked as “sacred” the public
area of Orsogna where members o f the community encounter each other. Another factor,
one that emphasized the collective community, concerns the affirmation of cultural
patrimony. The route follows the contours of the village. The celebration of the Tableau
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is a ritual performance unique to Orsogna. Other clues concerned the behavior of other
observers, men and women who would drop to their knees as the coffin passed. Men
removed their hats and made the sign of the cross. Women bowed their heads and some
cried. I use this incident to illustrate Rodman’s point, which is that there is more to
participant observation than figuring out what people do and the context in which social
interaction takes place(Rodman 1992). I recognized how important it was to grasp the
various ways the Orsognese weave space and settings together to enable and constrain
social interaction. With the exception of Silverman’s ethnography, this view of the
significance of space and behavior has been largely ignored in circum-Mediterranean
ethnography(Silverman 1975).
What constitutes data in participant observation? Where does one begin?
Initially, I simply observed the everyday encounters where conversations between persons
involved a “telling about” one's health, family, and whatever else either of the parties felt
appropriate to share with one another. I used these occasions to learn not only how to
listen but also to learnwhat to listen for. I watched the interplay between speaker and
listener for cues about what the Orsognese might expect from me when communicating.
For example, non-verbal cues such as the nodding of the head, eye contact, and so on are
an indication to the speaker that s/he has engaged the listener's attention.
Notes, Transcriptions, and Record Keeping
My usual pattern was to transcribe interview tapes immediately after
interviews. My intent was to review the transcriptions with the individual for correction.
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clarification, or additional comments during my follow-up visit. Transcription involved,
first, translating the interview from Italian to English and, second, preparing a transcript in
Italian to be reviewed with the narrator. The volume of transcription outgrew my capacity
to produce transcriptions in suitable time fi’ames. While most of the elderly women I
interviewed spoke in dialect, many of these women were also familiar with standard
Italian. Sometimes a woman preferred to speak one or the other—in either standard Italian
or dialect. Usually, I was able to grasp the general drift of what was said but I was unable
to comprehend the full texture of meaning as stated by the narrator. In cases where the
narrator spoke only dialect, a family member or close fiiend of the narrator would
translate from dialect to standard Italian. In all cases, it was the narrator who selected the
individual to translate for me. There were also those occasions where adult children of the
narrator spoke both standard Italian and English. I found these interviews most helpful
because I was able to improve my conversational skills in standard Italian. Women would
correct my Italian and explain the error I made in English. Hearing the pronunciation of
verb tense or phrase, I was able to learn the subtleties of tone and tense so important in
standard Italian. When the narrator responded in dialect, the friend or family member
would translate in Italian and, then, she would elaborate on the social implications of the
narrator’s response. I was fortunate to have as a neighbor a young Orsognese woman
who, as a student of languages, was fluent in three, including English. Signorina J would
help me with conversational Italian and dialect; I in turn would help her refine her English
conversational skills by speaking English. Signorina J would accompany me to interviews
where dialect was the only language spoken by household members. Signorina J also read
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Orsognese dialect. Her assistance, particularly in translating portions of Dr. Silveri's plays,
was invaluable. Because Signorina had appeared in several of Dr. Silveri's plays, she
could convey the meaning of the text as the audience understood it.
Dr. Silveri was kind enough to review many of my translations. More
important than his review of the translation were his extensive comments, which helped
me understand the Orsognese past, its social configuration, and the social significance of
phrases uttered by his characters. This contextualization of speech was invaluable, first,
because it prompted Dr. Silveri to reminisce about the social world of Orsogna where
these utterances were common, and, second, because it made it necessary for Dr. Silveri
to talk about social relationships within and external to the family.
I kept two journals throughout the research process to record reactions,
ideas, and feelings. I used one journal primarily as a means of examining and identifying
presuppositions. I combined questions for phenomenological investigation. That is, I
posed questions that helped me focus on both experiential and analytical issues: “What is
the nature of this phenomenon that makes it a meaningful experience?” I developed
questions from Burke's pentad: “What is the actor doing?” “How did the actor come to
be involved in this situation?” “Why does the actor do what he or she does?” (Burke
1966, 2). Often, when I was particularly puzzled, I would “cube” my examination to take
into account a multifaceted perspective. My term “cube” refers to applying to Sprawley's
(1980) social situation analysis and descriptive matrix questions derived from Burke's
pentad. My focus on context has been an invaluable device for recall during the writing of
this dissertation.
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The other journal I kept became a sanctuary of sorts: a safe place to
express my anger and disorientation, lack of confidence, and considerable doubt, a place
to worry about dwindling resources—stamina, funds, and time. Most of my journal entries
were written in the form of letters, some to my children, and to friends and others who
have a prominent place in my biography.
In recording these notes, I tried to situate conversations as much as
possible within the context in which they occurred, noting physical gestures, relative
placement of individuals in the room or store, timing, material surroundings, and details of
work being done while people were talking. This focus on context has been an invaluable
device for recall during the writing stage of research.
The women I worked with seemed to be more comfortable during the
taping of interviews than with my writing or note-taking during an interview. I obtained
permission to record interviews and to write notes. I made it as clear as possible to the
people I was with, in every setting, that I was doing fieldwork. I explained how
ethnographers work: take notes, gather data, and later write books, masking the place and
identities of individuals. In some cases this caused problems: some people expected thsx I
would use their names—even their pictures, a response I honor in spirit by using their
words, but not specifically by using their names or those of others whom they mention. I
committed to memory conversations held at times where note taking was prevented either
by social protocol or where note taking would put people off. I used my tape recorder
only with permission and discussed the ethics of privacy concerning all recorded
interviews.
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Interviews were more like conversations. When it felt appropriate, I shared
aspects of my personal biography with my narrator. I did so in part because the
Orsognese were, of course, curious about my own background and about my research.
More importantly, I sensed that it was crucial for Orsognese women to know something
about my persona or “heart” so they could assess both my character and trustworthiness.
Over time, I learned that I was considered trustworthy by narrators because they observed
that my actions were consistent with the self I had presented.
Orsognese Observations of the Ethnographer
My informants were hardly passive objects of study. They themselves were
actively engaged in a process of interpreting and trying to make sense of my work. My
status as an older woman, temporary resident, and divorced with no family in Orsogna
sometimes shifted the focus of interviews so that I became the person talking about
personal life and experiences. I was often asked why I did not study women in
Mozzogorgna, since people there knew my grandparents. In response, I told them about
the property that my grandfather left to the family who took care of him after the war. I
related that my appearance in the village was interpreted, despite anything I said, with
suspicion. I explained how difficult it would be to conduct research under these
conditions.
As to the other anomalies I presented, I attempted to represent myself in
what I hoped would be the least threatening way as mother, sister, daughter, scholar.
Stressing these social statuses seemed to help difluse Orsognese concern about my being
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an outsider. I also emphasized other identity categories that were more personal and less
distancing than scholar: guest, neighbor, friend entail a mutual sharing of feelings and
attention to reciprocity. Nonetheless, I was aware that my everyday activities attracted
people's attention. Any illusion I had that I could maintain some distance, some island of
privacy, was quickly dispelled by comments such as: “Oh, you were up early this
morning.” Reviewing my field notes, I find that my initial reactions coincide with
Comelisen's view of the Italian village as an inward-focused community, a society where
privacy is breached at every turn (Comelisen 1969 and 1976). Through time, my notes
show that I rejected this point of view and instead recognized that what I felt as intrusive
was more complicated and indicative of belonging. I developed relationships within many
different social networks that criss-crossed age and socioeconomic groups.
Feminist scholars in anthropology and other disciplines have drawn
attention to the power differential that exists between narrator and interviewer. In my
case, I doubted that the people I lived with and interviewed considered me “powerful.” In
fact, the reverse was probably more likely. It is highly unlikely that the women I
interviewed would talk about our interactions in terms of an imbalance of power. They
could refuse to talk to me as some did, or they could use my presence as an opportunity to
ventilate. I recall one occasion when one woman said to me: “We are willing to help you
because Americans need to know what happened here. First, your bombs destroy
Orsogna. Then, to feel good about yourselves, Americans send us what they don't want
and won't wear. And you Americans call us peasants.”
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While it is tnie that my status as scholar obliged regard, this regard had
more to do with local norms and less to do with eminence on my part. I was identified
with Regina and her family, a family respected by the community, and this association
made my research possible. Aware that my behavior would bear on their status and
reputation, I endeavored to achieve an impression that combined the attribute of being
non-threatening with that of being credible, competent, and professional. In practical
matters as well as in research-related areas, I depended on so many relationships that I felt
uncomfortable. Fieldwork demands that one intrude into the daily lives of other people.
It also induces a heightened sense of one's own dependence. Regarding the former, there
were occasions when I felt that nothing justified the degree to which ethnography required
me to intrude in a person's space, psychic or physical. As to the latter, there were a
number of occasions when I resolved to end my research as soon as possible, so sensitive
had I become to the degree of obligation I had incurred.
Most of the time, my way of dealing with this would be to write angry
letters in my journal and, then, go for long hikes through the mountains. Solitude shifted
my attention to the mountains that encircled me. Reflection helped me to regain
perspective, set aside my petulant self, and accept the unease that is a part of fieldwork.
In retrospect, I can appreciate that the importance of fieldwork lies in using the challenges
one is confronted with to hone research skills and to be reminded that the process of
understanding entails much more than data collection.
I initiated interviews in the first month of fieldwork, only after I had
determined what sorts of questions I wanted to ask and how to ask them. To prepare, I
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did the following: I had observed the manner and style by which people in Orsogna
converse; I attended to their conversation in order to learn their styles of interaction; I
noted the way women talked to each other, particularly the way they related their
experiences. I also watched interview programs on Italian television in order to refine my
adaptation of cultural Idnesics and proxemics.
I read Dr. Silveri's plays and books, and narratives and chronicles
produced by local historians in towns and cities surrounding Orsogna, as well as other
commemorative material. I did archival research at both provincial and regional
government libraries in order to obtain contextual data that would enable me to
comprehend more fully what women were telling me. Archival research also enabled me
to pose more precise follow-up questions.
AH interviews in Orsogna were conducted in Italian and in the narrators'
homes. I made appointments for the interviews, though in the second phase of fieldwork,
this became more like stopping by to visit. I would begin with some observation about
family pictures on display or about other memorabilia that narrators might want me to see.
Most interviews went on for more than three hours. As mentioned above, I was assisted
by a person who would translate dialect into Italian and English. On other occasions, a
close fiiend or a member of the family would assist with the translation. When narrators
preferred to speak in Italian, the assistance of a translator was not required. Most of the
women I interviewed were adults during the war; others were teenagers or young adults.
Some were children at the time and had vivid memories of particular incidents. In Chapter
3 ,1 discuss Dr. Silveri's recollection of the Allied bombing of Orsogna on Christmas Eve
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1943. A boy of seven at the time, he recalled wondering if the Allied forces knew that it
was Christmas.
In the beginning, I was ill at ease because my questions prompted
recollections of a tumultuous period in the women's lives when grief, hardship, and
misfortune consumed them. No easy solution presented itself as a way to ameliorate the
anguish my narrators felt. I came to accept the necessarily fluid nature of the interviews,
allowing the person to begin and end with few, if any, interventions on my part. I never
completely resolved my concerns about asking narrators to open doors to memory they
might have otherwise chosen to keep closed. I anticipated that the interviews would
indeed evoke a display of emotions; I could not foresee the suffering my narrators felt
since I had neither experienced war nor its conditions. On certain occasions, when the
narrator was unable to restrain her sobbing, I would turn the tape recorder off. It was my
practice, once the interviews were over, to accept any hospitality offered and to answer
questions posed about my life, my family, and my feelings about being alone. I answered
questions in a forthright manner, sharing with my narrators painful episodes in my own
life.
Interviews were informal. I kept before me a list of questions to refer to if
the occasion arose. I favored the non-directive approach I had observed on television and
among the Orsognese. I would say, “D/mme qualcosa. Signora. Una cosa lei ricorda e
moloto significato per lei.'' As the narrator responded, I indicated the level of my
engagement in several ways—for example, eye-contact, which reveals concentration and is
an indicator of respect, especially for the sharing of intimacies. Another indicator that I
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had grasped the significance of what was said was to nod my head affirmatively and say,
“Ho capito [I understand].” Italian conversational style also expects listener engagement
by simultaneous talking, and by repeating the speaker’s previously uttered key phrase. To
accomplish this as naturally as possible, it is necessary to attend carefully to the speaker's
utterances, listening for cues that invite one to join in the conversation.
A narrator would often begin by commenting that there was little she could
say except that war is brutal—what else was there to say? I would respond by making a
statement or asking a question that contained an obvious error such as the date of the
evacuation, or the name of the mayor. The narrator would correct my error and, then,
begin to recall events. Each interview set its own course. I kept my interjections to a
minimum in order to avoid directing the individual's narrative. I did ask follow-up
questions. I usually left reflective follow-up questions, which were slightly more directed,
for a return interview. During the follow-up interviews, I added specific questions about
episodes brought up during the first interview. If a topic seemed consistently
uncomfortable for those I interviewed, I tried to figure out why.
Ethnographers generally listen to their subjects in the field in a way that is
very different fi'om styles of general social interactions, since they have a different set of
goals in mind (Lawless, 1991). On the basis of my observations and interaction with the
Orsognese, I developed a new understanding of the communicative form. Silence is one
important mode of communication. The socially constructed patterns that narrators carry
within substantially determine the use of silence as an expressive mode in specific
situations. My own tendency is to interpret silence as dissonance, or as an intrusion of
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privacy. However, for the women I interviewed, silence either punctuated the expression
of something they deeply valued, or it was an invitation to respond to further inquiry about
some inference contained in their narration. Iff had ignored the salient nature of silence as
a communicative form, I would have centered on that aspect of interviews that elicits and
presents new or profound information. Inevitably, my misunderstanding of silence would
have precluded topics central to the narrators' lives. Moreover, a focus on silence as
dissonance would have increased the likelihood that I would not, or could not, grasp what
women value.
Focus O f Research
Orsognese women and their discourse about World War II are shaped by a
cultural repertoire that conveys and reshapes cultural meaning within certain parameters.
For example, confronted with death, women do not simply experience the need to survive
and “naturally” find the words to express this drive, nor do they experience the fracture of
family and social context and “naturally” find words to express its significance. Situated
differentially within the society, Orsognese women of different classes and age groups all
had to rely on the extant cultural repertoire in order to tell their “truth.” Women's
consciousness is constituted from their practical activities in the everyday world, from the
meanings associated with those activities, and firom the inherited or received categories
within the cultural tradition. Traditional history tells us more about what happened and
how it happened than about how people felt about it and what it meant to them. Why
have historians and others not pursued the subjective experiences of the past more
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rigorously? A partial answer, shaped by my own research, is that it is much easier to
document activities than feelings and values. Especially as an anthropologist, one has to
learn the language of emotions, the grammar of expressing feelings. This dissertation is a
step in that direction.
To some, the notion of a cultural repertoire implies cultural determinism.
That individuals are socialized as engendered beings, a concept inherent in Sahlins' notion
of “received categories” (Sahlins 1981) does not invalidate Marx's insight that women and
men make their own history, although they do so under circumstances they neither choose
nor fully control. The crucial tasks remain to explain cultural expression in terms of
historically situated consciousness. It is important here to note that, insofar as the history
of World War II is concerned, a masculine bias lurks beneath the claims of history to
objectivity, universal relevance, and “truth.”
Methodology of this Study
The impetus to study women's realities and perspectives raised certain
methodological issues. I wanted to avoid the portrayal of social life, based on certain
conceptual oppositions, that is characteristic of an earlier anthropology in Italy and in the
circum-Mediterranean area. Such oppositions risk use of the assumption of a single
“insider” point of view and is an anthropology that would depict Orsogna as a bounded
homogeneous “community.” Orsogna is a heterogeneous community with regard to
status, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation. Mindful of this, I had
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to consider many perspectives, all of which provided entry into the complexities of actual
social life and real people. It wasris not my intention to produce a synthesis.
As discussed earlier, my approach to fieldwork incorporated the methods
and techniques of ethnographic research. Through interviews and analysis of a wide
range of written narratives, I present in Chapters 3 and 4 women's assumptions and
perceptions in their own terms. However, I also found that too strict a reliance on
method as technique, or on research agendas, tends to reduce interviewees to “data
sources” rather than sentient beings, with the end result that the importance of
relationships and of consciousness in women's lives is given less attention than their
activities.
Geertz's critique of objectivity, as well as the work of Clifford and of
Marcus and Cushman, has had a profound impact on contemporary ethnographic research
and representation (Geertz 1973; Clifford 1988; Rosaldo 1989). Their ideas have shaped
the approach that I follow in this dissertation. And although I do stress process, I
nonetheless share the view of their critics, particularly feminist scholars, who point out
that the stress each places on process and representation reduces epistemological issues
about how we know whatever it is that we know. Indeed, some critics—particularly
Nancy Hartsock—have claimed that anthropology's turn to post-modernism accounts for
its claim that there can be no “authoritative” speaker or subject (Hartsock 1987, 86).
Moreover, it is a major epistemological contention of this dissertation that women's
experiences must be taken seriously as a resource for social analysis “to be theorized in
accounts of how societies work” (Abu-Lughod 1990, 16).
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Kelly’s comment that “embedded in and shaped by the social order, the
relation of the sexes must be integral to any study of it” is another element important to
the perspective I adopt in my discussion (Kelly 1984, 20). Through their narratives,
written and oral, it is the women themselves expressing their own understanding of what
that social order consists of and their places within it, given their various social identities,
that enriches and completes the text. With this as data, it makes it possible to learn
something about the categories of cultural evaluation and about the meaning of power,
how women understand their own sense of, and their perceptions of, the power of men,
that has not heretofore been part of “the record.” It makes it possible to see how
Orsognese women constructed and construct the categories of sociability, relatedness, and
community that I suggest in this thesis are the categories in terms of which Orsognese
women mediate the full spectrum of their experience, including that of the war years.
The application of feminist methodology in anthropological research means
more than ensuring that women's lives are included in ethnography. Methodology in and
of itself does not make this or any other research a feminist project. I consider
methodology much more than a system of methods and techniques for obtaining data. It
seems to me that the researcher's goals and techniques are necessarily integral to the aims
of research. I use the term “methodological” to signify a particular perspective concerning
hxawledge and the knower. Unlike the positivist tradition, which has prevailed in western
research throughout most of this century, feminist methodology not only generates its
“problematic” from the experience of women, but requires it (Westkott 1979). Feminist
methodology not only affirms the impossibility of an ungendered reality or perspective; it
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daims that all knowledge derives from an embodied perspective (Abu-Lughod 1993;
Hochschild; Haraway 1988;). My research focuses on women's social experiences and
their subjective accounts of those experiences—my interviewees were women who lived
through the war and whose lives were irrevocably affected by the war. I listened to their
narration as they revealed hidden realities that challenge the accepted “truths” and as they
offered new perspectives that cast doubt on official historiography. The content of
Orsognese women’s narratives, both written and oral, invited an exploration of the relation
between event and experience, suggested by Geiger, as shaped by the biographical
meaning of the event for the women concerned (Geiger 1990, 179).
I am aware of the dangers of generalization in regard to women's
narratives. In one sense, each woman's story is her own. I am equally aware that no one
person's story is just her own. This dual perspective is reflected in both my data collection
and my writing. It is important here that I draw attention to the significance of the Italian
term “commune” for it will alert the reader to meanings that signify something not entailed
in the English-language term “community.” The Italian term “commune" is widely used by
Orsognese and other Italians to refer to the municipality within which they live. However,
the term carries another connotation, one that refers to the issue of the “mutual nature” of
living together. In this sense, “commune" refers to shared existence, as to be in
communion with others. My aim is not to claim that the experiences of Orsognese
women are universal. Rather, my purpose has been to make visible the varying
experiences and perspectives that official World War n historiography denies as a result of
its silence with respect to women. Both in my fieldwork and in my data analysis, I sought
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the common as well as the diverse experiences of Orsognese women, with all their
intertwines and embedded aspects. Of central importance has been an effort to articulate
the meanings women attribute, individually and collectively, to their thoughts, feelings,
and acts(Di Lonardo 1987).
The notion of experience is central to my study. Narratives provide a way
to re-think what is meant by personal experience in the sense of cultural phenomenon, as
they reveal the complexity of individual human histories and their interrelatedness. Rather
than being something external that is internalized, experience is laced with culturally
informed meanings and feelings. I have made this point before, but it bears repeating:
Women's personal narratives are not independent o f their social context. I look for the
culturally embedded aspects of a single experience as well as for the inclusion of different
kinds of information. I do not see a “correct” way to describe or explain women's
experiences. Instead, I seek to identify the complex influences that shape the formation of
their narratives of the past. I take as my starting point the experience generally of
Orsognese women and, in individual cases, the experience of each woman within that
complex, interpersonal cultural context. Such a beginning acknowledges that every aspect
o f experience entails a network of elements embedded in a cultural context. It is this
sociocultural context that provides the rules by which self and interpersonal appraisals are
perceived and punctuated. For even as private thought is reflected upon in language, this
language can never be purely personal or private in that the cultural context defines what
one can be conscious of and what remains unconscious to individuals.
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Finally, the fundamental premises in terms of which I have organized the
representation of my research elaborates the gender issues that are implicated in my
methodology in at least three ways; first, sets of binary dichotomies that tend to be
characteristic of the way circum-Mediterranean ethnography has approached gender—
honor and shame; private and public spheres—constrain and distort the way concepts of
gender are both explained and represented. That is to say, the relation of power and
empowerment in Western European and Mediterranean ethnography has been assessed
less as a function of grounded theory and more as the imposition of concepts of gender
and power characteristic of American culture. Contemporary anthropology, influenced by
theoretical shifts within and outside of anthropology since the 1970s, however, has
produced extensive evidence and counter-arguments that make many of the binary
assumptions and claims of the received research standard less compelling (Albera 1988;
Nelson 1974; Rogers 1975).
Second, the embedded nature of engendered social roles and identities,
subjectivity, and the social construction of experience have been shown to be historically
contingent. Feminists, anthropologists, and historians do not define their purpose as a
matter of compensatory practice by giving more focus to women and their experiences.
Their purpose is to contextualize women's experience within the social world that
qualifies the legitimacy o f women's subjectivity. It seems to me that experience and
subjectivity cannot be taken as either self-evident categories or unproblematic categories.
I attend to the nuances of myriad elements that configure experience and subjectivity in
culturally shaped ways. I follow Di Leonardo’s practice in that I stress the cultural matrix
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through which women perceive events and offer my analysis of what I think are the
important categories that constitute that matrix (Di Leonardo 1987). I do not offer a
definitive analysis. I welcome the perspectives that others may potentially offer to the data
gathered. I believe that women's words, thoughts, and knowledge and insights, taken as
frames of reference for gender analysis that can be trusted to provide symbolic mediation,
will produce a more fiuitful understanding of gender as the basis for understanding and
completing the human record.
Lastly, anthropologists and historians who have examined the “colonial
encounter” fi’om the perspective of women—particularly women of color and European
women—have shown that the categories through which history is apprehended, along with
a profound examination of the nature of knowledge, its production, and power relations,
required exegesis. I situate my research within this attempt to examine critically
historiography's “grand narratives” and its myriad presumptions about the varying
historical activities of women and men and their contentions over gender imageries and
practices.
It was within the context fi’amed by the principles and dynamics just
outlined that the terms sociability and relatedness presented themselves as crucial factors
in the Orsognese women’s creation of community. The terms themselves are a gloss for
the phenomena I observed and experienced. Nonetheless, whether it was a matter of
recall of events in 1943, the local standards applied to current relationships (I have cited
several instances), or the interactions I witnessed in a wide variety of circumstances, the
precepts of sociability and relatedness seemed to inform their interpretation of experience
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and their making sense of social life. Because culture is about—among other things—
making choices and about being constrained not to make other choices according to
underlying norms and values, these cultural precepts play a pivotal role in shaping the
ways in which Orsognese women understand themselves and their social interaction.
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TRANSLATING CULTURE
Introduction
My objective in this chapter is to describe the process of discovery I
experienced in Orsogna as I pursued my research—a process that expanded my
consciousness and significantly enriched the results of my data gathering. I frame this
discussion as a dialogue between myself and my daily practice of anthropological inquiry.
In the course of presenting various examples from my notes and journal, I discuss how this
dialogue enhanced my understanding of and appreciation for the ways in which encounters
in the field shaped inquiry. Less concerned about “right interpretation,” this dialogue
enabled me to recognize both the openness and the amplitude of anthropological inquiry.
My field experience was a little like walking through a gallery featuring the work of
Jackson Pollock: I would struggle to find the meaning conveyed in Pollock’s painting just
as I struggled to find some key with which I could begin to interpret and comprehend the
coherence Orsognese find in their world.
My discussion focuses on learning fi-om my own direct experience
and fi'om awareness and reflections that would bring meaning to light. I adopt
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which he defines as “a system of dynamic interaction
of structure and action, society and the individual,” because it enables me to
describe Orsognese social life as mutually constituting the interaction of the
63
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structures, dispositions, and actions whereby the social structures and embodied
(therefore, situated) knowledge of those structures have produced, among the
Orsognese, enduring orientations to action that, in turn, are constitutive of social
life(Bourdieu 1977). These orientations are at once “structuring structures” and
“structured structures” (Calhoun, Lipuma, and Postone 1993, 3). That is to say,
my focus on the meanings the women in Orsogna derived from their experience led
me to explore social structure, situated knowledge, and those dispositions that
shape, and are shaped by, the narrators’ social practice. The meanings invoked by
the women shaped and were shaped by social practice as a river fits and shapes its
own banks.
Another concern central to my discussion is Oakley’s criticism of positivist-
inspired research (Oakley 1981). She credits positivism with advancing the notion of
“hygienic research”—the idea that research methodology is objective and culturally
neutral. Oakley criticizes the authority assumed by positivism to discern the “truth”
underlying social reality. Positivism emphasized objectivity and the detachment of the
researcher as exemplified by the hierarchical relationship between interviewer and
interviewee(Acker et al 1983). Standard practice tended to focus on data more as
information and less as meaning. Thus, social inquiry led to the mystification of both the
researcher and the research as objective instruments of data.
Inquiry grounded in concerns that focus more on method or technique and
less on meaning can seriously limit the researcher’s ability to grasp the full breadth of
human experience. For example, interviews used as a method of positivist research tend
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conceptualized as “data resources” to be mined in the production of information. Less
attention is given to interviews as occasions where meaning emerges, as expressed in the
mutual give-and-take of questions and responses, and where meaning is constructed
through the discourse between interviewer and respondent(Denzin 1989). Thus, it is the
search for data rather than meaning that guides the way questions are formulated. Too
often more attention is given to what questions might be asked than to a thoughtful
consideration of learning how to ask questions in ways that enable people to disclose in
their responses their preconceptions, knowledge, meaning—that is, their own “truth.”
A feminist perspective in anthropology has meant, and continues to mean,
more than ensuring that women are included in an ethnographer’s description and analysis
of culture. Its aim is not concern with adding women simply as a means of reclaiming
their experience, past and present. The aim of feminist perspectives is epistemological: the
importance of using women’s experience as a resource for social analysis, to be taken into
account in the effort to determine how societies work. It is a concern about knowledge,
both as a “knower” and what it is that can be “known.” (Abu-Lughod 1986). Moreover,
it is this preoccupation with women and their experience as proper units of social analysis
that tests the adequacy of methods or techniques for data collection and interpretation
(Harding 1987). In a sense, women are “native speakers” of their social situation(Friedl
1967)..
All inquiry begins with questions. Proposals for field research stress
content questions, “what,” “why,” and “how.” Method is addressed by “how” questions.
The critical difference between the well-developed research proposal and its
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implementation is the experience of being there, in elsewhere. Before leaving for the field,
one is often advised that flexibility is important in fieldwork. Quite often the novice is told
that the scope of her or his study is likely to change. What is not said fi-equently is that
once fieldwork commences, issues of method—those issues previously accepted as
straightforward techniques—will become problematic.
Beginning Fieldwork
I arrived in Orsogna on New Year’s Eve 1989. Nothing I had expected to
happen happened. There was no settling in, no walks through the town to acquaint myself
with its layout, no time to plan daily work schedules. My work began immediately when I
was invited to accompany my sponsor, Regina Raimundo, to a funeral mass. (All names
used in this dissertation are pseudonyms.) In Chapter 1 ,1 described how I met Regina and
why I decided to shift the site of my research fi'om my paternal grandparents’ village,
Mozzagoma, to Orsogna. The Raimimdo home is located beyond, or just offi the
periphery of the town’s center. The Orsognese designate location by reference to
landmarks, especially the Piazza. Everyone will tell you that their casa (home) is a Piazza,
just off the Piazza. Actual locations can range fi’om a house located on a side street to a
house situated three miles firom the Piazza.
From an Orsognese perspective, the Piazza is the physical and social
center. If you were to inquire as to the whereabouts of your fiiend and you were told that
he or she was a Piazza, you were told more than the simple location of your fiiend. To be
a Piazza signifies a location but also, more importantly, it signifies a social activity. The
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Piazza is a public performance arena where one expects not only to observe others but
also to be observed.
The Piazza is also the merchant center of Orsogna. Various stores, banks,
and cafes are located on the circumference of the Piazza. The municipal building on the
north side of the Piazza and the Church of St. Nicolas on the south side are the two
prominent landmarks that one encounters upon entering. On the north side, beyond the
municipal building, is thebelvedere, the panoramic view of the Sangro River Valley below
and, in the background, the Maiella, the largest range in the Apennine mountains.
Orsogna is what is usually referred to as a mountain town, a term widely used in the
anthropological literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Looking toward Orsogna from a view
across the Sangro valley on the northern side of the mountain from Lanciano, Orsogna
appears to straddle the very edge of the mountain ledge. The view from the belvedere is
one of cultivated land and fallow fields far below. Standing there, one recognizes the
military advantage the high ground that is Orsogna afforded the German Army.
One walks up a steep and narrow hill to enter the observation area on the
belvedere. On the right is the Church of St. Nicolas, the locus of Orsogna's beloved
companello (bell). This is the church where I attended funeral services on New Year’s
Eve within minutes of my arrival in Orsogna. I recall entering the church and my
preoccupation with the contrast between the soft candle lights that illuminated the interior
and the black-gray darkness of night that enclosed the entire area in a thick fog and made
Orsogna seem even more impenetrable to a novice in the field. As the coflSn bearers left
the church to walk through the Piazza toward the waiting hearse, the relatives and the
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friends of the deceased standing outside the church did something that seemed so strange
to me; they clapped their hands as one would applaud a stirring performance. Then, the
male bearers carried the coffin from the church in procession along a route, as I would
learn later on, that designated the end of the public community of Orsogna. Joining
Regina in the procession, I felt lost in time and space. The dim light of candles outlined
the coffin that, balanced on the bearers’ shoulders, swayed with the pace of their slow
walk. Franciscan friars, in full habit, carried a large crucifix that was barely visible in the
fog. They began to chant prayers in Latin and the people comprising the procession
responded in Latin. Because of the fog, the voices seemed disembodied. Coming down
the Piazza, crossing its center, and then moving along narrow streets, we finally turned
onto a street that ran parallel to the Piazza. At a certain place, the procession stopped.
The family of the deceased walked toward the hearse and their cars. A space separated
the family of the deceased and the rest of us. Just as I was about to ask Regina about the
separation of the two groups, she turned to me and said, “This is where the fnends say
good-bye and allow the family their private moment at the cemetery.”
I had come to Orsogna to listen to women talk about their experiences
during the war. My research concerned the relationship between culture and sense
making; how Orsognese women would draw on their culture to make sense of their war
time experiences. I did not expect the narratives to be homogeneous. Beyond relating the
context of their narratives to historical reality, I was interested in women’s narratives less
as reflection and more as constitutive of meaning. I wanted to understand the concepts,
orientations, and dispositions by which Orsognese women comprehended this
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unprecedented event in their individual and communal biographies. My initial experience
as participant at a funeral—one of the most intimate o f human rituals—provided a field
event I would not fully decode for many months.
First Phase Of Fieldwork
I marked the beginning of my enterprise in ajournai entry in which I noted
how the contrast between the luminosity inside the church and the darkness outside, with
its dense fog, seemed a perfect metaphor for the beginning of fieldwork. As one aroused
fi’om a nightmare tends to do, I sought the light of understanding and a sense of safety,
and, in striving toward that goal, I confi’onted the “how” questions of method in ways I
never anticipated.
Neither neutral nor unproblematic, method is the means by which we
access the structure of the habitus that shapes the subjectivity of the cultural group within
which we live and work. In what follows, I discuss how questions about method
influenced the way I was able to discern meanings encoded within women’s written and
oral narratives. I draw my examples fi"om interviews and daily conversations in which
women might express themselves by use of a particular word or expression whose
meaning seemed at first self-evident but which, upon reflection, proved problematic. I
discuss how these occasions provoked an examination of the concepts and assumptions I
used to interpret what was said. But exploring what women said, juxtaposed with how I
understood what they said, required different sorts of questions and a focused listening.
Central to this chapter is my claim that the effort at sense-making applied to every facet of
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my research. Thus, my purpose in this discussion is to show that my engagement within
the community began with my effort to understand narrator comments as orientations,
dispositions constituted by and constitutive of the community of Orsogna. It is practice
on this level of engagement that makes a reflective examination of process imperative.
Informal occasions—i.e., engaging in the ordinary—enabled a path of inquiry
I had not expected. From the very beginning of my research, I took two kinds of notes;
descriptive notes and notes about my spontaneous reactions to whatever happened. The
latter note-taking strategy proved to be very helpful during the course of my research. I
noted a pattern of thought that was preoccupied with participant observation as a bundle
of techniques. To illustrate, the following entry describes a walking tour of Orsogna with
Dr. Silveri.
March 7, 1990
I felt blind. Dr. Silveri showed me where this and that had happened but did so in a way as if we were in a receiving line and he was telling me something about the people I am introduced to. I tried to image what the fields below might have looked like during the battle of Christmas 1943. The tears in Dr. Silveri’s eyes concerned what I felt about the experience. I had asked Dr. Silveri to do this [to accompany me] without expecting that his feelings would still be so intense. I could not feel the emotional intensity I sensed in Dr. Silveri’s voice. I felt awkward and angry that I had provoked a painful experience for him. His words were descriptive but his tone was intense, conveying terror, rage, and fear. I saw space, a verdant valley. I heard silence. He saw bombs exploding, fires, and other things refracted through a maze of memory. I’m not in the same Orsogna he is in.
In the remainder of the entry, I wrestle with strategies for understanding—
as if entry into the sort of consciousness manifested by Dr. Silveri was simply a matter of
better observation. I concluded that the issue was not one of observation but rather of
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meaning. What had occurred that afternoon disturbed me because I realized that grasping
meaning was more complex than I had expected. It seemed to me that I presumed that my
concept of place as physical space and spatial structures, as neutral space for social
interaction, could be applied in Orsogna. Viewing the Sangro Valley sprawled below, I
saw topography. Yet, Dr. Silveri’s description affirming Rodman’s claim that conceptions
of physical space evoke meanings that reveal the extent to which membership within the
community associate physical space with significance.
Although a number of community studies by European anthropologists has
implicitly dealt with the concept of local identity, many have treated local identity as a
function of parochialism and sociocentrism. A new approach, one influenced by the work
of cultural geographers, especially Dr. Yi-Fu Tuan, examines issues related to local
identity as a measure of how groups perceive and structure their social world. Dr. Yi-Fu
Tuan uses the term “topophilia” to refer to the “affective bond between people and place
or setting” (Tuan 1990, 4). Place-bound identity has recently been the focus of several
European ethnographers and folklorists whose work shows how a sense of place can be,
and often is, an extremely meaningful component of individual identity (Badone 1987;
Cohen 1982)
A group’s reference to place-bound identity suggests a sense of self that
becomes inextricably linked to the physical components of a place. It also suggests that
physical space and layout are organized cognitively in ways that are laden with meaning.
Everyday behavior is not simply a product of the comings and goings of people in physical
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space. Rather, people participate in place-bound ways of life; that is, space and layout are
transformed by the meanings they invoke for the residents of the community.
Glassie says that place bound-identhy depends on one’s connections with
history, both factual and mythic (Glassie 1982, 664-665). It seems to me he includes the
notion of “personal history” because he says that locals understand themselves as both
historically and genealogically linked with the past, as life transpired in that place, as the
living results of the historical process, and that they could not be fully understood or
known without acknowledging “local history.”
In the previous chapter, I mentioned the ways in which the Orsognese
tended to speak about Orsogna as an embodied community. In his description of the
effects of the war in Orsogna, Dr. Silveri writes: ‘"'La vita si Ferma a Orsogna nel
novembre 1943 [Orsogna life ended in November 1943].” Extended residence in a place
tends to make us feel toward it almost as toward a living thing. Orsognese express a sense
of place that comprises a totality of perceptions and knowledge gained by their long
experience in their village and intensified by their feelings for it. Affect cannot be divorced
fi-om its expression and the setting of its expression. Here I utilize Durkheim’s notion that
how people feel in a particular situation is not only supposed to be “natural,” given the
situation, but it is also socially expected or even socially required. Not only the individual
but also the situation has its emotional dimensions, and what the individual feels is to a
significant extent a function of the emotional requirements of the situation. The sense of
community the Orsogna women sketched is dynamic, alive with people, with the memories
of what relation-ships were important and what constituted the texture of those
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meaningful relationships. In recounting their experiences, narrators were simultaneously
expressing a sense of themselves. That is, the women conveyed ideas of what they were
like “then” and stated ideas about what those times and what other people meant to them.
Social relationships were the core structuring element in the narratives I gathered
throughout my research.
Participation in social life, daily activities, the normal and extraordinary are
the components of “local history.” In recounting stories of their wartime experiences,
women recounted and affirmed who they were and are. It was as if each narrator said: “I
am the product of what I do, and in contemplating and discussing where I did it, I
contemplate and discuss myself.” Place-bound identity, as it revealed itself in the
ethnographic context, included the emotions and the knowledge attached to their place
and to the components of their place. Their emotions arise from knowledge derived in a
context that inevitably tinges their contemplation of their physical surroundings. What
they say about their feelings is important because an examination of what these self
appraisals meant shows the relations of power and authority that are considered natural.
Here we can obtain information by applying Foucault’s illuminating question: “Where is
the effect of power in this knowIedge?”(Foucault 1980).
The case of Rosa and Rocco, who courted via the telephone because of
what people might say or construe about a public courtship, is a particularly significant
example. Besides courting by phone, Rosa and Rocco rendezvoused elsewhere, outside of
Orsogna, for afternoon dates. It appears that their behavior was motivated by a concern
about how others would perceive them and how others would respond if they were aware
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of their courtship. How others made sense of their personhood was based on knowledge
about both Rosa and Rocco and what that knowledge means within the social universe
that is Orsogna.
Rosa’s husband died quite early in their marriage. His death was caused by
a blood clot in the brain. Twenty years later their son died, also due to a blood clot in the
brain. These tragedies became descriptive parts of her social persona, her self-perception,
and the knowledge about her grief others associated with her persona.
As the grown daughter of an elderly mother, she was someone socially
perceived to have “daughterly” obligations and responsibilities toward her mother even
though her mother lived with Rosa’s married sister. Despite the fact that Rosa maintained
her own separate household, she bore responsibility for being available to her mother and
for a public display of her “care giver” role. Her mother lived with Rosa’s sister because
in the Orsognese scheme of things the mother is more useful in a home where there are
children and grandchildren than in a home where their are none.
On the other hand, Rocco, a retired school teacher, was socially viewed as
a “confirmed bachelor,” and a member of Orsogna’s “literati.” Confirmed bachelors are
males over the age of 50 in Orsogna, and there are only a few there. Bachelors are less
the subject of talk and gossip than are widows, older unmarried women, and, for that
matter, widowers. Older widowers and confirmed bachelors are not candidates for
opposite-sex relationships, especially if they are being cared for by a sister, daughter, or
some other female (and usually her family) close relation. The same applies to older
women, whether widows or unmarried adult women. Their close public relationships are
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both kin, thus making it safe for a woman to be seen with a male, and non-kin members of
the same sex. However, in the case of bachelors, widows and widowers, and unmarried
adult women, to court publicly would confront norms according to which love and
marriage are for the young and late marriages for widows and widowers are a comment
about their sexuality.
All of this seemed foreign to me. Why would two grown adults let others
define who they were and make public pressure a reason for publicly denying the apparent
interest in and affection each felt for the other? I tried to envision another scenario, one
that would permit their public relationship. I could not envision a scenario, within the
Orsognese perspective, that would be without negative consequences. I could not
envision one that would not inflict shame or guilt, one that would not invite punishing
public gossip. The Orsognese have a proverb that says, “Whether you say something
good or something bad, you will talk about me.” Orsognese take it for granted that others
will talk about them ; therefore, much of their comportment in public is in effect giving
others something to talk about. If you can’t prevent others from talking, you can at least
“write the script” of what they will say. Recognizing the inevitability of what others
would say, in effect recognizing that there could be no alternative script, courtship by
telephone and rendezvous was the only recourse Rosa and Rocco had. If they had been
tempted to be rebellious, it would have been literally self-destructive, for their public
relationship would have been grounds for others to alter the way they construed Rosa’s
and Rocco’s personae.
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Community is created when shared experience charges the area with
meaning. Meaning is what gives physical space its evocative charge, for a sense of
membership and belonging forms when significant facts and connections are attached to
the landscape (Badone 1987; Cohen 1982). Moreover, I agree with Scott’s statement that
“women’s experience, when contrasted with official pronouncements on the meaning of
war, provides insight not only into the discrepancy between domestic, private history and
official, national history, but also (and more important) a means of analyzing how and by
whom national memory is constructed” (Scott 1988, 3-4). The experiential meanings we
ascribe to place are much more complex and more vivid than the ones we pick up
secondhand. It is one thing theoretically to presuppose a multiplicity of forces in any
social formation. It is another to examine discursive practices and unpack the layered,
encoded meanings. The more that surfaces and the more questions that arise, the more I
wonder at the intricate and complex ways people learn to behave and rationalize their
behavior. What links the account of Rosa’s and Rocco’s courtship to the following is that
space itself is shown to be a domain of meaning (Rodman 1992; Pratt 1980). The physical
layout of Orsogna is not a neutral or passive “back-drop” or setting for actions and
activities. Rather, it is evocative and encoded with meaning. I think the important
observation to be made is that people’s concepts acquire meaning not simply in relation to
other concepts but also in reference to context.
Toward the end of my first quarter of fieldwork, I accompanied Regina as
she walked fi'om her home to her shop, which was located on a side street off the Piazza.
Before leaving the house, I grabbed my travel suit, thinking I could drop it off at the
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cleaners on my way to my afternoon interview. As I locked the door, Regina, who was
waiting for me in the driveway, said; “What are you going to do with your clothes?” I
told her that I planned to stop at the cleaners on my way to Signora D’s. I did not think
there was anything unusual about Regina’s question. As we were about to exit the
driveway, Marco, Regina’s son, pulled in and offered to drive us to Regina’s store. As
soon as Regina was settled in the car, she turned to Marco and urged him to drive me
directly to the cleaners because it would not be appropriate for me to carry my “dirty” suit
in full view of whoever could see me walk across the Piazza.
Marco’s first response was to shrug off his mother’s concern, but Regina
insisted, saying that he must drive me because “it would not look right. What would
people say and think!” We arrived at the store and as Regina opened the car door, she
turned toward Marco and simply said: “Drive her there.” As soon as Regina shut the car
door, I told Marco that he did not have to drive me to the cleaners; I certainly could walk
the short distance to the cleaners and I would not be going out of my way because I had to
pass the cleaners on the way to my afternoon appointment. Marco told me not to be
concerned. He would drive me because his mother was correct: It was not “right” for me
to carry my dirty clothes across the Piazza to the cleaners.
Until he said this, I had interpreted Regina’s exchange with Marco as a
“culturally neutral” mother-son exchange. It reminded me of exchanges I have had with
my own son who very often decides that his plans do not include doing a “favor” for his
mother. I was puzzled by Marco’s response. I began to re-examine what had transpired
and, as a consequence of this, I understood why Regina had insisted that Marco drive me
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to the cleaners. Because taking clothes to the cleaners—walking and physically carrying
the clothes to the cleaners—is for an urban American a casual activity, something I do as
an “ordinary” activity, something I “think” people “do” everywhere, it did not occur to me
that the act would be significant in a different context.
Participant observation gives us a cognitive map of “elsewhere,” but it does
not convey a sense of community. Perhaps that is why I interpreted Regina’s admonition
to Marco as an assertion of parental prerogative. Because Regina and Marco had both
emphasized the potential damage of being seen in public carrying clothes, I recognized
that they conceptualized my “ordinary” act as something “extraordinary.” I had lacked the
knowledge to understand that my behavior would provoke disapproval, that I was “giving
people” the opportunity to say something negative about me and potentially Regina, who
was known throughout the community as my sponsor. Discursive practices are not purely
ways of producing discourse. Rather, they are embodied in situations and in patterns of
behavior. Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that to live in a place endows one with
certain preliminary patterns of thought as well as the stories and musings which give body
to that thought. I attempted to unravel the ideological meanings that are coded into the
“taken-for-granted” meanings that circulate in everyday life. One aspect of community is
the shared meanings with which the paths, buildings, and physical space and patterns of
daily life are endowed. Another is the way of structuring and interpreting experience and
related memory that generates the discourse of insiders.
Though different, each of these illustrations underscores the way
Orsognese women construe themselves as embodied social roles. In each case, there
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appears to be a recognition that their Orsognese sense of self takes into account social ties
and bonds, what I glossed as concepts of sociability and relatedness. Rosa’s social
identity as “widow” and “obligated daughter” does not permit public evidence that she is
also someone’s “beloved.” Furthermore, this notion of sense of self as defined by social
roles, ties, and bonds is constituted by and constitutive of social life in Orsogna, which
reinforces relatedness through the ways people make sense of their own and other’s
personhood, through “common sense” expectations about the behavior of others, and
through a web of socially accepted obligations and responsibilities.
Second Phase of Fieldwork
These episodes had several implications for the next phase of my fieldwork.
First, I became much more aware that participant observation required the use of meta
consciousness as a means for monitoring the assumptions on the basis of which I
interpreted observations. Quite often, participant observation is described as analogous to
the state of a child who has no preconceptions or expectations and, therefore, experiences
the social world as a process of discovery. The episodes also made me realize that there is
no easy way to disengage from one’s own cultural orientations. As the product of one
culture, I had to learn how to perceive the world in terms of a quite different culture. As
an observer, obvious differences are easy to perceive. More difficult to recognize are the
assumptions I was invoking when as a participant I attempted to interpret a certain aspect
of social life.
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Second, it is never a simple matter to see what is actually before us.
Culture organizes what it registers as memory, knowledge, and imagination. When
participant observation is conceived of as “method,” there is a tendency to focus on “local
knowledge” as a matter of “knowing how,” as a system for uncovering cultural rules as
guidelines for behavior. It seems to me that this approach obscures the more powerful
aspect of participant observation, which is to discern those assumptions that are the basis
on which people make sense of their lives. In this respect, participant observation is more
directed to the way people “know that,” in the sense of the assumptions and the meanings
people evoke when engaging in sense-making. Participant observation, in my opinion, is
more than a research methodology; it is an ontological experience. When familiar issues
are encountered in different settings, they may be seen from an alternative point of view,
or seen through the eyes of an outsider and, thus, one’s own preconceptions and
expectations are changed or at least challenged.
I entered Orsogna with a culturally calibrated consciousness. As an
observer-participant, I had to improvise behavior in various situations in which I felt I did
not know how to respond; I had to determine what words to use, and what feelings were
to be felt:
Journal Entry, April 23, 1990
There was a murder in Orsogna last night. Edos’s body was brought to his home at about six p.m. Family and others left the living room as the undertakers made the viewing preparations. Viewing is an Anglo- American concept. For the family and others, Edo is “a coso” for the last time . . . I stayed for a short time and left. I feel strange and out of place because here everyone knows that there is nothing to do but everything to
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feel and I don’t know how to be someone who knows that there is nothing to do.
Finally, this entry is illustrative of the way discomfort can be informative.
This entry suggests to me the importance of being able to locate data that may be
revealing in the experience of social disjunction. Because I am “other,” I notice my
discomfort with a difference and it is in contending with this difference that my practice
begins. What I find interesting in the above entry is my recognition that the tools I have
for understanding others, for trusting my perceptions, for “reading” social life may not
apply in this setting, or at least caimot be applied without reflection. In this case, I notice
discomfort as manifested by the dissonance I experienced between my actions and the way
I felt about those actions.
I think contending with discomfort guides an anthropologist’s
understanding of how observations fit together within a system unique to the culture
understudy. Because we leam by encountering and comparing more than one version of
experience, it seems to me that the nature of participant observation is ontological. The
context of participant observation provides a unique opportunity to participate in social
interaction without finding answers to the inevitable mysteries, or making do with
fi’agmentary answers. As a result. I, as a participant observer, came to understand that the
version I hold to be true depends on context and cultural orientation. Participant
observation broadens my consciousness and changes something within me because I am
aware of multiple, often contrasting, versions of social practices. And what I leam as a
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result of the process becomes a part of my cultural lens, which filters all future perceptions
and occasions for learning.
As I began to interview women, I noticed that within the flow of
interviews-as-conversations, I began to focus on the various ways in which women used
narratives to interpret social reality and on their interpretations of personal experience,
which invoked assumptions constitutive of that social reality. It seemed to me that a
chasm was developing between what I and the women I interviewed thought were
important questions to ask. I recognized that my questions were embedded in a different
cultural system of knowledge and meaning. My attention was drawn to the assumptions
on the basis of which I had phrased the questions. I began to examine what I took for
granted, the concepts that previously had seemed to be universal, that I believed to be
“facts.”
Chronology is a case in point. I accepted as an unquestioned fact the
received chronology of World War II as beginning in 1939 and ending in 1945. Yet, the
women I interviewed said the war began in 1943, when the fi’om moved into Orsogna, and
ended in 1944, when “the fi’om moved fi’om Orsogna to the north.” What are the
potential levels of discovery between what I thought self-evident and what the Orsognese
women meant by their statements? Perhaps the most significant discovery concerns the
nature of the received past and how the received past is conceived of as public property.
A received past emphasizes linear cause and effect, diminishing the past as
also private—a view of the event as “my own” and the relevance of the times as personal.
And as personal experience, “the war” for the Orsognese began at that point at which it
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radically altered daily life. ’’''La guerra ” (war) in one sense exists as an ‘‘''elsewhere”
meaning a place men went to mainly because they were forced to go. When an Orsognese
woman says ‘‘La guerra e bruto. Tutto e destructo [War is brutal. It destroys
everything],” she is referring to her experience in the face o f battle, the disruption o f her
way o f living, and the uncertainty o fsurvival. Once I “decoded” this, I was able to hear
the shifts in meaning invoked by women as they talked about the war.
Somewhat muted in this distinction of the narrators’ use of the term “la
guerrcF is a contrast between the war as experienced by men and the war as experienced
by women. Men went to war, but the war destroyed the expected, the predictable and the
regularity of women’s lives: family, casa (home), work, sociability, and community. The
women’s narratives described their struggle to maintain these “certainties,” which are so
integral to their identity. In Chapter 4 ,1 provide a detailed discussion of several narratives
that illustrate this point. In terms of this discussion, it is important to note that it was not
so much the war that was the source of their despair as the chaos it induced and the
dissolution it brought to the regularities of their social existence.
After about one month of interviews, I became increasingly aware of
certain meanings that emerged during the interviews. After conducting an interview, I
would return home to my apartment and replay the tape. These moments of solitude were
necessary because often my attention was so focused that I did not always hear what was
said at the time. Having done this for a week or two, it occurred to me that I had indeed
missed important opportunities for follow-up questions and, even more important, I often
seemed to be on a very different track from that of the narrator. I began the interviews
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treating them as a component of my project, with a preference for questions about
activities and facts. I became aware of a suspicious absence, due to methodological
caution, of questions about feelings, attitudes, values, and meaning—about what had been
in fact most threatened, such as family, love, spirit, received standards of good and evil.
I also realized that I was working with limited, almost exclusive concepts
of data collection, site, and social life. I was not listening for orientations within the
community, or for how women’s narratives constructed the social reality that constituted
their lived experience. As a result, my direction and awareness shifted from that of data
collector within a site to that of a listener attending to the situated knowledge conveyed in
women’s perspectives.
I do not now, nor did I then, consider these episodes of reflection as
examples of ineptitude or lack of craft. Rather, I see the example provided above and
others that I discuss in this chapter as a natural outgrowth of my preoccupation with
process and a heightened self-awareness of true engagement. Nor do I claim that these
examples are unique to my research. I consider them to be the manifestations of what is
encoded in the caution that “your proposal will change once you are there.” What may be
different is that I have elected to write about these instances not as anecdotes but rather as
the core of my data, as integral to a subtle evolution in my field perceptions.
Third Phase of Fieldwork
The third phase of fieldwork was less time-defined than developmental: I
began to notice that treating interviews as query and response set up a hierarchy that
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presumed the woman I was interviewing was knower and that raised implicit questions
about what the woman could know. I felt a sense of unease because the question-and-
response format seemed to produce a bias in my favor that is, the researcher is a scholar
and the interviewee is the source of the data. In this particular division of labor, it is
supposedly I the knower who sorts and sifts through data to find the “truth” in a woman’s
comments. Instead, I learned that the interviews could provide an opportunity to enter a
system of meaning different from my own.
The meanings that emerged during the course of conversations between
myself and Orsognese women left me more mystified than knowledgeable. Since women
frame answers in terms of their interpretive community, their statements are embedded in
their social situation, which produces enduring orientations to action. Thus, what began
to emerge from these interviews was less an assembly of data than a collection of
kaleidoscopic images that shaped, and are shaped by, the collectivity of Orsogna.
Soon it became apparent to me that if I continued to treat the interviews
solely as a technique, I would create a dissonance between project goals and field of
experience. Most field manuals focus on interviews as a strategy for data collection; that
is, they provide guidance on how to act and how to phrase the non-directed cue for the
respondent in order to induce the respondent’s elaboration. While such manuals provide
commentary on the experience of interviewing, it is less directed to the subjective
experiences of being there and, more cautionary in tone, becomes a reminder that one’s
stance is to be neutral and objective. Such commentary creates the illusion that one enters
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the field as a surgeon enters the operating theater that is, one is in a theater where one’s
skill and specific technique are applied to a presenting “problem.”
I doubt that any manual could have prepared me for the tension between
the emotional landscapes I was privileged to witness during interviews and a deeply
embedded cultural sense of violating a rule of privacy. Profoundly aware of the
“wrongness of prying and intrusion,” I not only felt constrained at first to ignore narrator
displays of emotions, but I also was inclined to pay scant attention to the em otional
co ntent of the person’s experience. Nevertheless, the tension I experienced refiised to be
compartmentalized.
Curiously, while replaying the daily accumulation of interview tapes at
night in my apartment, I felt no sense of having violated a rule against the invasion of
privacy such as may have occurred when I was recording the interview. Listening in
solitude, I began to discern patterns of “enduring orientations”—that is, dispositions and
expressions of values that seemed to be still present in Orsogna. Why was it now possible
for me to be consciously present as I listened to a painful recollection? How was it
possible for me now to be aware of all the things I could have said but did not say because
of an unnamed constraint? I clearly recall searching in my memory for clues of various
encounters in Orsogna. I was no longer thinking about my research as a project with an
“agenda,” but, rather, I was searching for examples of Orsognese sociability, a “way to
be.”
I recalled an observation Regina made when I talked with her about my
research. She remarked that for me interviews were a task, work to be accomplished in
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order to complete my project. For the women I interviewed, she noted there was a more
important concern: whether or not they would permit me to know what was in their
hearts. Regina cautioned me to leam to approach interviews from an Orsognese
perspective, which included an invitation to enter the experiential world o f another.
Regina’s comment proved to be illuminating for it gave form to and articulated the
concept I term sociability. Among the Orsognese, sociability accentuates affect as it does
process: to understœui the other is to leam how the experience in question was fo r that
other. It seems to me that Regina’s use of the term “invite” corresponds to Gadamer’s
phenomenological notion of conversation as a process during which two people seek an
understanding of each other (Gadamer 1986, 347). Thus, process and afreet—sharing with
another the feelings and texture of the experience, rather than simply telling another about
the experience, as in reporting on it-locate the individual in context and in relationship, in
short defining her/his position within the community.
I learned an important lesson during this phase of fieldwork: that listening
to narratives as if the “data” at issue are separate from the narrator tends to subvert
discovery of the intersubjective “habitus.” The standard evoked by “Orsognese
sociability” also required that I listen to various levels of the expressive self
simultaneously. For instance, when Dr. Silveri described the bombing of Orsogna on
Christmas Eve 1943, his narrative began with the expression of a child’s anticipation of
Christmas and recollected his fears, as a seven year-old, of the bombardment. Continuing,
he spoke about a child’s struggle to understand why anyone would drop bombs on
Christmas Eve. In his struggle to make sense of “this madness,” he arrived at the
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conclusion that those who dropped the bombs didn’t know it was Christmas. He recalls
himself shouting, “E Natale! E Natale! [It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!].” The persona of
the little boy, confused and vulnerable, was the voice urgently saying to me, “Capita'! [Do
you understand?]”
Dr. Silveri’s narrative provided much in the way of data about families,
about childhood, and about parent-child interaction during the German occupation and the
battle for Orsogna. Yet, his question as to whether or not I understood signified
something more important than these bits of data. I sensed that he was asking whether I
could grasp a child’s fear and resentment, as he had felt it at the time, in the midst of
bombs exploding on Christmas Eve. If my follow-up questions had ignored this, if what I
said next disregarded the web of significance that Christmas Eve had then and that all
subsequent Christmas Eve’s have had for Dr. Silveri, I would have demonstrated a lack of
“um anita a closed heart as indicated by the inability to recognize the humanness of
another.
Similarly, when Signora D described how she and her small children were
restricted to the entrance of a cave because there were no adult males in her family, and ,
therefore, her “family” could not contribute to digging a cave for shelter. Signora D was
not simply recalling an event fi-om the past. Her memory, like that of Dr. Silveri, was a
construction of what it meant to be present in those private and very harsh realities. In the
case of Signora D, the significance others placed on their own personal survival
transformed them, in her mind, to “anim ale [animals].”
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When I returned for a follow-up interview, I found it difficult to persuade
Signora D to further elaborate on her recollections of the cave incident. Her resistance to
the topic was an important lesson. In my initial interview, I had attended more to the
implicit gender subtext and less to the signora’s expression of her experience. This serves
as a good example of the potential consequences if an interviewer’s focus is placed too
selectively on specific data contained within the unfolding narrative. These encounters
taught me that if I approached interviews solely fi-om a perspective of obtaining data, I
would tend to listen to and, moreover, view the narrator solely as a source of data. As a
result, the more subjective feelings, and “history,” remained dormant. The subjectivity of
relationships and responses and the mosaic of meanings embedded in them would be given
less attention than the activities encoded in those recollections. In these two cases, it was
particularly evident to me that I had lost an opportunity to leam about a woman’s and a
man’s emotional reality.
My remedy, thenceforth, was to engage in careful observation as to how
people modeled intimate conversations in daily life. There were ample opportunities in
Orsogna. Whether in Regina’s store, where women would gather to talk about their
husbands, family, or themselves, or in homes to which I had been invited as a guest, I
studied the way people made connections as they conversed. I began to model the modes
of interaction I observed the Orsognese using. For example, in conversations between
speakers of the same and opposite genders, it was important to accep t pauses and silence
rather than interpreting them as cues for questions, or as cues for “turn taking.” Equally
important was my own sharing of experience, talking about myself, my times of despair.
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It seemed to me that opening myself up to the Orsognese women was less about the facts
of my life, though that was important, and more about whether I had experienced
suffering, pain, and outrage. It seemed important to the Orsognese to know that I could
empathize with their pain. Indeed, I think it was a knowledge they required in order to
share their experiences with me. Such openness also had another function: it denominated
my “um anita.”
It is the absence oV um anitcC that makes a person seem to exhibit
characteristics of an animal because such a person cares first and foremost for themselves,
their own needs, and those important to them. They act in a way that disregards the
general well-being of the community. I first encountered this distinction in a rather
amusing way. I asked Signore 2 the name of his dog. He replied, “Corwe [dog].”
Thinking that perhaps I had not stated my question correctly, I tried a second time:
“Questa came e cara. Come si chiamel [This dog is sweet/cute. What’s its name?]”
The owner replied: “Came! Came! E chiami cameC [Dog! Dog! His name is Dog!]"
The significance of the terms “umanitcC and “anim ale” in Orsognese social
life has remained important. The incident that made the ethnographic basis of these
concepts resonate was the murder of Carlo. On the night of the murder, the usually busy
Piazza was empty due to the televised soccer game between regional competitors for
Italy’s national team in the 1990 World Cup. Carlo’s body was discovered by a member
of his family who had gone into the store to help Signore close the shop. The cause of
death was suffocation induced by tape wrapped around Carlo’s nose and mouth. The
murder was the first in Orsogna since the period following the end of the war. All social
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and commercial life in Orsogna stopped on the day of his funeral. While various theories
abounded as to the identity of the killers, people drew a distinction in assignment of
motive for the murder between am m azzare (the act of killing) and a ssassim (the act of
the killer) as the doing o î “l 'animale”
Particularly in the initial interviews, it might have been the case that I was
more attentive to certain hunches I had about patterns I thought present in the narration.
Preoccupied with my own thoughts, I would sometimes miss a speaker’s spontaneous
reflection on a matter that precipitated her disclosure about what this event meant to her.
For example, after a day of interviewing, I would visit with Signora F, who was my
landlady and someone I considered a friend. I looked forward to these visits for the
companionship and relaxation they provided. For me, these visits were conversations
between two women who shared experiences as daughters, wives, and mothers and whose
lives, though very different, were marked by hardships. I never thought of these
conversations as interviews; yet, I found that I never entirely stopped listening for data
that would illustrate, clarify, and amplify something I had heard during my day-time
interviews.
One evening. Signore F was recalling how difficult it had been for her to
accept and live through the untimely death of her husband. She stated in a rather matter-
of-fact way that after the funeral, she went to bed and remained there for two years. Her
fiiends looked after her and her children. Responding in terms of my own culture’s
imperative to function even in grie^ my attention shifted to the various levels of meaning
encoded in her narrative. Grief was something that required public expression and the
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state of grief permitted the grieving to enter a kind of limbo. What I now grasp is the
contrast between F’s description of her grief and the absence o f this type of grief in the
women’s narratives of their war experiences. Signora F’s husband died in the post-war
period when there was social time for grief. On the other hand, during the war
soprawivere (to survive) held a privileged place. Yet, my notes of that evening’s
discussion between Signora F and myself stress questions of the contrast between
Orsognese and Anglo-America cultures. In effect, my attention had shifted to the
implications of what was said as these related to my own cultural categories.
This is not to say that comparison is inappropriate. However, in this case I
think comparison was premature because the descriptions and observations I attended to
were filtered through my own cultural orientation. I would not have been struck by
Signora F’s statement about “taking to her bed” if that action had not reflected strong
cultural differences. By moving quickly to comparison, I presumed a resemblance in
categories such as depression, grieft and loss without first determining what these
categories meant to the Orsognese. How do concepts of depression, grief, and loss
adhere within the larger social universe that is Orsogna and what behaviors do they
prescribe for engendered beings? Later, as I tried to understand why I responded as I did,
I recognized that I had conceptualized my time with Signora F as non-work and,
therefore, was fi"ee of the task of data collection. I had learned to escape the science of
listening in order to practice its art.
More importantly, the precepts of data collection as technique did not seem
to provide me with a language suitable for inquiry about sensitivity. Coming from a
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culture where popular self-help psychology relies extensively on talk of feelings, my first
inclination was to formulate questions about a narrator’s interior life on the basis of the
model I knew best; What were you feeling? What was the feeling like? Can you describe
your feelings? I assumed that such questions had a universal validity.
To have raised these sorts of questions in Orsogna would not have
encouraged conversation. Most of the time, women would simply respond with the term,
“Come? [What?].” More telling than their “non-response” was their look of total
bewilderment, which I interpreted as “It is not clear how I felt? I just told you that I had
pain!” It was at this juncture in my research that I began to be less concerned about data
and more concerned about how what I said and the way I said it would signify to the
women I interviewed my interest in their subjective experience. I would have to learn the
language of affect. As Cicourel and others have pointed out, interpretation begins by
seeking to understand narrator’s lives (Cicourel 1974; D’Andrade 1984; Geertz 1973,
Geertz 1983). A configuration of meaning within a social community may be shared, but
it is by no means shared equally, nor is it shared neatly and universally among the members
of the community.
To learn the language of feelings and states of being, I had to listen for the
differences among women and men, who as engendered social actors used particular
expressions of affect. I use the term engendered not simply in reference to differences in
the kinds of speech patterns employed by women and men, but to connote the process of
formulating a consciousness that, in turn, reflects a particular subjective view of the social
community to which both women and men belong but in which membership is defined
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differently for each. Through its myriad verb forms, in both spoken and written modes,
the Italian language forces precise expression of states of being. By tagging pronouns to
the ends of verbs, the Orsognese speakers do not imply a separation between the “doer”
and the “deed.” To say “io parlo [I am speaking]” places emphasis on the subject and
verb. Who is the I that speaks? The‘T ’ who speaks is an illusion. One can experience
another who speaks but not the subjective‘T’ of the one who speaks.
When a speaker of the Italian language says “P arlo [I am speaking],” she
or he places the emphasis on the action, the speaking as an accountable action of the one
who speaks. If I posed questions that presumed the person was separate from the action,
narrators became confused as to what I was asking them to respond to. Instead, questions
of affect have to be set in a context: “Senti Signora, dimme qualcosa lei recordi quando
lei nostro marito e morto? Comme sentito? E molto provati da quell esperienza? ” Here,
the question emphasizes the subjective “you,” in the sense of an encompassing sentient
being not split in two spheres—of the rational and of affect. Because the pronoun “you” is
dropped and tagged to the end of the verb, the phrasing emphasizes a subject recalling the
experience, rather than its objective reporting from an observer’s point of view. Then,
because focus is given to persona—the self that feels—one can now follow with the
questions, “What did you feel?”
The Evolution of Data into Vital Life Experience
So far I have discussed the problems I encountered when considering
issues about how to ask questions narrowly defined within the parameters of method and
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technique. By use of various examples, I have attempted to show how seemingly
ordinarily encounters in the field helped me to recognize the importance of context.
Interview narrowly defined as query and response tended to set up a hierarchy that
prejudged the narrator as knower and raised issues about what the narrator could know.
If the narrator is seen as a provider of data and if it is the interviewer who analyzes the
data, then the interviewer is focused on the quality of the person’s narration. If, on the
other hand, whatever the narrator says is seen as the expression o f a knowledge system
saturated with meaning, then the interview assumes an entirely différent significance. The
discovery of meaning is the on-going to-and-fi*o movement of ideas and messages between
two or more sentient beings who filter what is said through different cultural meaning
systems.
What I have said might seem self-evident. Indeed, it could be claimed that
most manuals for field study make this very point. However, what I was recognizing as
novel was the process of discovery as it evolves w ithin the context of practice. I think this
is essential because it ensures that theresearch data are embedded within the community.
To know a rule does not necessarily mean that you know how and why it works. It is a
little like the game of chess; one may know the moves all the pieces can make and not
know how to play the game.
My concern with process demonstrated to me that a narrow focus on
formulating questions disregards the contextual nature of interviews informed by local
knowledge and networks of meaning. Furthermore, as evidenced in the examples I have
provided, treating interviews simply as a method for obtaining data removes from
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consideration the developing, or incipient, discourses that are the very nature of
interviews. It is in the unfolding of the discourse between two persons that meaning
emerges and what will emerge cannot be predicted. Thus, it seems important to recognize
that it is crucial to know what questions “say” to narrators, and where they point the
narrator’s thought process.
In addition, field interviews are more or less encounters of difference. My
interviews provided a context that afforded me the opportunity to learn something about
my own assumptions, which inevitably shaped my work. What people told me had to be
placed in context so that I could understand how and why this or that meaning was used
to fi-ame what was said. In order for me to understand what a statement meant and why
this meaning was being invoked, it became necessary to turn to the wider community.
Interviews, in the sense of what I term “encounters of difference,” can be highly
informative about the social variables that strongly condition the kind of fi-ame chosen to
convey the narrator’s experience.
To illustrate, the word sofferenza (suffering) was consistently used by
many of the narrators in their summaries of wartime experiences. When I first
encountered the term sofferenza, I gave it an English gloss and took it to mean the
equivalent of the English term suffering. This initial translation impeded my ability to
grasp the underlying salience of women’s stories in which the term was used. I assumed
that narrators were making an appraisal of self-evaluation in ways that closely correlate
with those of ray own culture. I was inclined to accept the term as unproblematic until it
occurred to me that my own cultural orientation would be to derive a different
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connotation on hearing the term. For example, I would not readily describe the
experience of humiliation as “I suffered humiliation.” Rather, I would be more inclined to
say, “I was/ am humiliated.” Sensing dissonance between what was said and how I
translated what was said, I realized that my own cultural presuppositions hindered my
ability to understand the meaning encoded in the way women used the term. Not until I
recognized that I could not assume I knew the cultural significance of data did I begin to
examine the cultural significance of women’s utterances as they were actively interpreted
by others also present during the interview.
The term sofferenza is analytically significant because it is ethnographically
situated. Our feelings about our feelings are often clues to important matters about our
lives; how well we fit into our lives, how we experience ourselves, and how we relate to
others. Abstractly and complexly structured, the term so fferenza requires explication by
the open-ended approach suggested by Rosaldo, “to look beyond the word itself to
sentences in which it is employed, the images through which it is employed, the images
through which it is involved, and the social processes and activities” Orsognese women
use to describe themselves (Rosaldo 1980, 24). I focus on this term because invariably
women used it as both a personal description and a term of self-appraisal, not only in the
context of interviews about the war but in the context of ordinary daily conversations.
By focusing on this fi-equently used term, I was able to track inferential
pathways through webs of associative knowledge that underlay its various meanings. Like
Quinn’s analysis of key words in her study of Americans’ understanding of marriage,
which demonstrated that some of the most basic of American social institutions are built
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on cultural understandings about persons, emotions, and human relationships, I too
attempt to demonstrate that the meanings presupposed by the term sofferenza provide an
important source of evidence about the link between social structure and practice (Quinn
199x).
It seemed to me that there was more significance to women’s use of the
term sofferenza than “suffering.” As happens so often in the field, serendipity makes
clear what conscious effort sometimes obscures. Laura, Regina’s daughter, and I were
talking about matters of the heart, especially the intense feelings experienced when
intimate relationships end. As she described the sequence of events that led to the end of a
long-term romantic relationship, Laura would build transitions to the next scenario by
using the word sofferenza. For her, its use was less a summary and more a statement of
the totality of her being at the time. Interrupting her, I told her that I had difficulty
grasping the meaning of the term when women I interviewed used it in the way she had
used it. I then explained how I “heard” the term in the English-language sense. I told
Laura that I knew the problem was more than a matter of vocabulary. In rather a flippant
manner, I told her I was fiustrated and that I probably had to be “Orsognese” to
understand the term’s connotations. Silence followed. I felt a large lump in my throat,
then suddenly felt very self-conscious. Unwittingly, my interruption had shifted the focus
of our conversation fi"om Laura’s sadness to my fioistration. I read Laura’s silence to
mean that 1 was insensitive and that I showed little regard for her willingness to share her
feelings with me.
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I misread the silence, for Laura smiled and said “Basta. Non it preoccupi.
M i penso. [It’s okay. Don’t worry. I am thinking.]” She said that my example was a
good one because it helped her understand how I understood the term. However,
so fferenza as she had used it had an altogether different meaning. She explained by
drawing on various concepts of self as an interior place constitutive of the identity, spirit
and soul, will and perspective with which we encounter life. As I understood her, Laura
seemed to be describing a centered self that assumes the personal is the social. For
example, Orsognese women frequently say, “La vita non e facile [Life is not easy].” The
expression conveys a realization that pain is a part of life and so it is to be expected.
Yet, in its communicative context, the expression is more about how one
behaves toward others in difficult times. It is as if to say that personal pain and troubling
times are not reasons for anyone to forget that personal behavior is always public.
“Sofferenzaf Laura concluded, “is what is experienced by women who encounter pain
and yet respond in ways” required by social attachments and responsibilities, while at the
same time expressing the pain of a self that is grieved.
What I found striking was that Laura conveyed a sense of self that was
fundamentally interpersonal, depicted neither in opposition to an autonomous self nor in
hierarchical relations; in her view, neither the social nor the autonomous self had more
value than the other. Rather, I imagine that the self, as she conceived it, is like a concerto
by Mozart wherein two distinct themes co-exist to produce a tone that cannot be
duplicated if one note is changed. It is important to conceptualize the persona as a unique
composite, a mosaic in which the fundamentally social aspect gives form and definition to
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the persona. From the Orsognese point of view, sofferenza is the pain internalized
because life and the circumstances we encounter in life require us to respond as social
beings. Living as a social being requires that one stretch the centered core of one’s being
in order for the self to engage others and to be engaged by others.
Sofferenza is an expression of self-appraisal and refers to what must be
endured by the‘T ’ to meet a situation as it is, not as one wants it to be. For example, if
Signora D had challenged the authority of those who relegated her to the front of the
cave, what might the outcome have been? She might have succeeded in shaming them and
thereby securing a place for herself and her children within the cave’s interior. On the
other hand, she might have alienated them in their weakened sense of community, thereby
finding herself and her children excluded from the cave. This is not to say that these were
her only options. Other options might have been equally possible.
Nevertheless, applying what I came to understand about the concept of
sofferenza altered the terms by which I understood the various meanings encoded in her
recollection. Initially, I “heard” “data” about male dominance, about order maintained in
chaos through social structures, and about cultural notions of what “makes” a family a
“family.” What I could not “hear” was the subjective response indicative of what those
structures meant to Signora D. What I had assumed to be evidence of women’s
powerlessness and their subordination to men seems less straightforward and more
complicated. Now, it seems to me that one of the many meanings encoded in Signora D’s
brief narration is an awareness that being a part of a larger group, being defined by a
context, offers a different kind of strength. That I was inclined to hear “powerlessness” is
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more about my own cultural orientation, which associates independence and authority
with strength, and less about what Signora D was conveying to me about her experience
as a woman.
Sofferenza is used by women as a description of self-appraisal in a
particular context. What is important about the use of the term is not its function in
classifying a state of being. Rather, its salience lies in the associative webs of knowledge
that the term invokes in the consciousness of listeners. Women use the term to describe
themselves during an episode in their lives that presented formidable and inevitable
consequences for actions taken or not taken. Not only the individual but also the situation
has its emotional dimensions. What women described as their feelings is, to a significant
extent, a function of the emotional requirements of the situation.
Conclusion
Two important lessons learned during the third phase of fieldwork—lessons
that profoundly shaped the analytical strategies I employ in the next chapter-are as
follows: (1) It is not the case that ethnographic interviewing simply provides privileged
access to “private” experiences or to the essential identities of individual actors. The
meanings woven into sense making and the processes by which these meanings are
negotiated are intensely embedded within a community that is instantiated in various and
complex ways as the fabric of social life. (2) During the course of my stay in Orsogna, it
became evident that Orsognese women draw on the culturally available model of emotion
and they can be seen as often making some different kinds of sense and claims fi-om it.
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In the case of the former, I became sensitive to the data I gathered because
fieldwork demonstrated how profoundly meaning is ingrained in culture and language.
Fieldwork enabled me to transcend abstract notions of meaning and to grasp it, as Bruner
so aptly puts it, “a very special kind of communal tool kit whose tools, once used, made
the user a reflection of the community” (Bruner 1990, 11). Attention to the voices of
social actors is of intense significance to various contemporary perspectives on social
research because to interpret meaning and meaning making in a conscientious manner, as
Bruner advises, one must take into account “the structure and coherence of the larger
contexts in which specific meanings are created and transmitted” (Bruner 1990, 64).
Concerning the latter, fieldwork provided an opportunity to explore Lutz’s
observation that not only can one ask about the cultural foundations of things construed as
emotion, but also, one can examine the organizing category of emotion (Lutz 1990). It is
generally assumed that women’s talk about emotion—in western hierarchical societies—
manifests what Rosaldo(1984) terms the “rhetoric of control”, and Lutz describes as “talk
aboutcontrolling emotions, h an dling emotional situations as well as emotional feelings,
and d ea lin g with people, situations and emotions” (Lutz 1990, 72). Indeed, Rosaldo
(1984) claims that hierarchical societies seem to evidence greater concern than do more
egalitarian ones with how society controls the inner emotional self and, as Lutz observes,
“with how one part of a bifurcated and hierarchically layered self controls another” (Lutz
1990, 73). When emotion is conceived as something inside the individual. Lutz claims, it
provides an important symbolic vehicle by which the problem of social order can be
voiced. She writes;
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Because emotion is constructed as relatively chaotic, irrational, and anti social, its existence vindicates authority and legitimates the need for control. By association with the female, it vindicates the distinction between and hierarchy of men and women. And the cultural logic connecting women and emotion corresponds to and shores up the walls between the spheres of private, intimate (and emotional relations in the ideologically) female domain of the family and public, formal (and rational) relations in the primary male domain of the marketplace. (Lutz 1990, 87)
As will be shown in the next chapter, the narratives of Orsognese women
are striking in that they do not reflect a “rhetoric of control” as one might expect given the
patriarchal nature of Italian society. Instead, they represent emotion not as chaos but as a
discourse on problems—sadness is a discourse on the problem of loss, fear on that of
danger. For this reason, I situate my analysis in attempts to recast the association of
women with emotion following in the tradition of Hochschild (1979; 1983), Abu-Lughold
(1990), and Lutz(1990), widen the scope of inquiry by elaborating an enriched
anthropological perspective perspectives. Each has contested both the irrationality and the
passivity of feelings by arguing that emotions reflect problems in women’s lives. Abu-
Lughold’s study of Awlad ‘Ali (1986), in particular its comprehensive illustration of how
the particular kinds of emotions allocated to and voiced by women articulate with other
aspects of their ideological and social structural positions, serves as a guide.
Preview of Chapter 4
The strength of narrative data, is its “plurality of interpretation”—that is,
narrative opens up the possibilities for a variety of analytic strategies. Such approaches
also enable us to think beyond our data to the ways in which accounts and stories are
socially and culturally managed and constructed. There are also multiple questions that an
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analyst can pose textually, each eliciting different meanings of the text. In the following
chapter, I begin at the manifest level of the text as an entry point to get at latent meanings
that are not explicit. When applying the principle of plurality of interpretation, what
matters is to formulate explicitly the evidence and arguments that enter into interpretation,
so that the interpretation can be tested by the reader. Hence, I formulate an interpretation
that derives, first, fi-om what the subjects themselves understand to be the meaning of their
statements, and, second, fi-om the content of what is said—i.e., I pose the question, “What
does the statement express about the phenomena of gender, or kinship, or community and
so on?”
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ANALYSIS
Introduction
The focus of my analysis concerns the w hat of experience, the object
correlate and the way in which the what is experienced, what is said about the experience,
and what is assumed or considered by the narrator as all relevant prior knowledge needed
to make sense of what is said. I refer to the latter—i.e., to relevant prior knowledge—as
cultural premises or assumptions, beliefs, or rules that are otherwise unstated. My objective is to start from inside the narrative, from the meanings already encoded in the
form of expressions used by the narrator and expand outward, identilying propositions
that make the expressions sensible. I select this strategy because it privileges the
narrator’s experience. My “voice” in this discussion is one of a translator who facilitates
understanding by explaining how narrators connect their lived experiences to the cultural
meanings of those experiences as well as the reality of “what happened.” Meanings are
not only received but also constructed: individuals actively attribute meaning by drawing
upon their cultural matrix to select the cultural premises—beliefs, values, rules—by which
they comprehend and thereby interpret experience. It is generahy agreed that the
attribution of meaning is pervasive throughout experience. It is also commonly accepted
that narrators, as speakers and authors, always mean and convey more than they say.
Therefore, meaning is made clear as the relationship between what is said and what is
105
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unsaid becomes explicit. As a consequence, the question. What is the meaning of the
narrative? is not significant; multiple meanings emanate fi-om all levels of experience.
In the course of my analysis, I intend to demonstrate the plausibility of the
first of several claims: that the cultural ideas of sociability and relatedness organized the
way Orsognese women construed their experience during World War II. Cultural notions
about sociability and relatedness are important elements in the ways Orsognese women
understand themselves and others as persons and in the ways they approach social life
within the community. In their assessment of themselves and others, Orsognese women
assume that identity is rooted in membership within a community of others. One’s identity
is forged in the social experience of sharing existence with others and in maintaining
equilibrium between self and others. That is not to say either that Orsognese women
avoid conflict or that they are willing to “sacrifice” self- interest rather than confi-ont
conflict. Orsognese women assume that conflict and harmony, as well as pain and joy,
happiness and sorrow, hope and disappointment, are merely different aspects of the human
condition; therefore, one will inevitably experience all of these states of being. One’s
internal state, however, is constrained by the social nature of being a self among other
selves. This entails in one’s ontological development the achievement of an authentic self
and the responsible fimction of that self in a community of others—the creation of a
conscious fit between one’s own social formation and the self in relation to others, which I
gloss as sociability and relatedness. In attending to these primary dynamics in their
cultural practice, Orsognese women create and sustain community. This process begins
with a seemingly innate standard of personal responsibility.
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By focusing my analysis on what is said and what is unsaid, I propose to
make clear inferences that tie what is said to features of the cultural context in which it is
embedded and to various unstated background propositions. Shweder points out that
Labov and Fanshel’s seminal study on the analysis o f discourse (1977) has made it
“axiomatic” that in a speaker’s use of ordinary language, far more is meant than is said and
that what is unsaid bears information about cultural beliefs and knowledge that “transcend
the grammatical and referential aspects of language” (Shweder 1991, 186). I draw upon
Shweder’s model of unpacking meaning in discourse. Here, I use Shweder’s words to
present what he refers to as “axioms and their corollaries” of discourse analysis, which I
adopt as the approach underlying my analysis.
The indexicality axiom states that what is said carries indexical meaning—
that is, what is said is never a complete representation of what is implied or suggested or
gotten across by what is stated (Shweder 1991, 197). A corollary of the indexicality
axiom says that in drawing inferences from what is said to what was unsaid, participants
need to be informed, and in fact become informed, about things that were never mentioned
(Shweder 1991, 197). Second, the prior knowledge axiom states that for an inference to
occur in the construction of meaning, the recipient or observer of a communication must
have sufficient prior knowledge to infer the implication or suggestion that is basic to the
meaning of what is said (Shweder 1991,197). According to Shweder, the prior
knowledge axiom implies as its corollary the “principle of intersubjectivity,” which he
claims states that participants in discourse (whether written or oral) address utterances to
others, “who are assumed to have sufficient prior knowledge to understand them”
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(Shweder 1991, 197). Shweder also daims that prior knowledge indudes unstated
propositions that are brought to bear on interpreting what is said; “to the extent the
interpretation works it gives a sense of reality or objectivity to the unstated proposition”
(Shweder 1991, 197-198). This sense-making process is sometimes referred to as the
instantiation of beliefs, which Shweder defines as the point at which “the utterance is seen
as an instance of an unstated general proposition that is already known” (Shweder 1991,
198). Another implication of prior knowledge is its capacity to generate information.
Because discourse relies on making inferences firom what is said to what is left unstated, it
has the “power” to inform those involved about things that were not explicitly stated. The
third axiom of discourse analysis states that the relevant unit of analysis is the entire
communicative array, “linking by means of knowledgeable inference what was said to
what was meant” (Shweder 1991, 198). Shweder’s phrase “communicative array” refers
to a “set o f coexisting elements—speech (what is said), context, and background
knowledge—in which the three elements bear a mutually constraining relationship”
(Shweder 1991).
Part I. Narrative Analysis
Each section of this chapter deals with translated narratives of one or more
of three Orsognese women and my related analysis. In the course of my analysis, I
examine segments of the narrative making explicit various assumptions, beliefs, and rules
o f the narrator that lend meaning to what was said but were presupposed or otherwise
left unstated. Here I focus on elements of the narrative where meaning and the coherence
of what is said are dependent on processes of inference and on unstated propositions
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constitutive of cultural knowledge. Though not exhaustive and conceding the possibility
of other alternative interpretations, my analysis is a “reading” of the narratives wherein I
attempt to facilitate a cross-cultural understanding of the narrator’s experience by drawing
attention to certain narrative elements and expanding these elements so that what was
meant is made clear.
For a person’s story to count as “proper history,” Hayden White says:
It is not enough that accounts deal with the real rather than the imaginary events according to a chronological framework but that they be narrated as well. That is to say, the account reveals a structure, an order of meaning that they do not possess as mere sequence. (White 1992, 4-5)
To uncover the “order of meaning,” Wfliite proposes a question that I used
to engage each narrator as I read her “text”: What principle or rule of meaning could have
required her to record this episode in this particular way?
What follows is a brief excerpt from a two-hour interview with Signora A ,
who was twenty-three years old at the time of the evacuation in 1943. Her father and
three brothers were in the Italian Army, stationed in Yugoslavia. With her two younger
sisters, her mother, and paternal grandmother. Signora A was forced to evacuate Orsogna
in December 1943. She recalls:
Narrative, Signora A
During the very long months [from December 1943 to June1944] in which the Germans and Allied Forces fought in Orsogna, we Orsognese lived a hard, terrible life, the most terrible of our history. When the Germans consolidated their position in Orsogna, they became violent, mean and sometimes ferocious. After the battles in December 1943, we fled into the countryside around Orsogna. The German soldiers forced us to leave our shelters in the countryside, line up and under the threat of guns aimed at us, we were forced to walk to Chieti from where we would be transferred later on, with so many diflSculties, to other quieter regions of Italy. The
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Orsognese melted their social nucleus—their community and scattered a little everywhere in every region of Italy.
What does this narrative reveal about the way Signora A construed the
events she witnessed in Orsogna? Notice how Signora A emphasizes the “we” of
community as her orientation. It is the “we” of membership that gives testimony and not
the‘T’ of a self who recalls an event. And as well, notice how she conveys her notion of
community as embodied, conveyed by her description of the dissolution of the community,
the melting of the social center by evacuation and dispersement. By her use of the first
person plural, the narrator focuses our attention not on herself but rather on “we
Orsognese.” Whether the verb endings indicate a first person singular or a plural pronoun,
their significance refers to context and is shaped by a myriad of contextual factors. The
social context appears to be embedded within the self that gives testimony, since the self
must always exist in context.
One prominent theme is not only that the dispersement dissolved the
community but also that it ruptured social ties and bonds that were constitutive of “self.”
In their diaspora, they will remain “Orsognese.” But Orsogna, the embodied community
of relationships and reciprocal exchanges between individuals and groups of individuals,
has dissolved.
Continuing her narrative. Signora A draws our attention to the nature of
the situation as an occasion for creating a kind of community:
We were only women and old people. We conferred with each other. We collected the few things we could bring (to the cave) some blankets and some socks. There still were some donkeys in Orsogna. They were for carrying our children. While we all, with a mattress on our heads, left for our destiny. We went to a rise just in the middle of the woods and we
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settled on a slope. We were about two hundred people, the only ones who had remained in the town.... With what hope . . . and what mood were we climbing up there? But there was no alternative. Twice a day we cooked a porridge. It was a kind of glue, but it kept us in life. The cold was intense and there was snow. We lay down all close to one another just to get warm, we were fifteen in our cave. From this shelter, we could see the destruction of Orsogna. Germans were setting all the houses and bams on fire. Everyone was able to recognize their houses on fire. Crying, then screams, curses started . ..
Signora A’s narrative seems to be less an account of events and more a set
of themes, preoccupations, and attitudes that reveal, through the analysis of small
particulars, the logic of forces that shape sense-making. Despite the divergent individual
subjectivity producing these narratives, it is possible to inquire as to what those things are
that are considered natural and assumed to be self-evident about the configuration of the
social community. A social problematic is cast as the narrative’s necessary beginning
point and central concern. “Only women and old people,” faced with no other alternative
for survival (in wartime Orsogna), had to remove themselves fi-om the familiar and known
and enter the unknown and unfamiliar. The narrator’s reference to the screams, curses,
and crying on the part of those who looked down to see the fire enveloping their homes
and community has a profound resonance.
I heard similar screams and curses during my stay in Orsogna, particularly
on the night of Carlo’s murder. At that time, I attributed the expression of wrenching
sobs to the violence of his death. But Regina told me that I did not understand the
meaning of “death” as the Orsognese understood it. According to Regina, for the
Orsognese death was the absence of life; the end of possibilities and potentialities, the
absence of hope. So long as there was life one had opportunities to participate, to be a
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“maker of one’s days.” Figuratively, the fires the Nads had set destroyed life in the
context in which these women participated and “made” their lives. It seems to me that the
narrator’s reference to “only women” is more a description of the group than it is a
commentary about women’s status. It is not so much that being “women” made them less
capable of facing the trials and challenges that lay ahead. Rather, I think the narrator
refers to the recognition of being faced with an unprecedented situation in which
circumstances precluded any easy recourse to previous experience. That evening, the fires
leveled differences between individuals and groups of individuals. A kinship of a sort was
forged in the destruction of a shared way of being and of living. It was not a case of “my”
house, my “life” in flames, but rather of “our homes,” our “lives” in flames.
As the discussion so far illustrates, I look for indications of how women
string together major statements about their wartime experience in order to understand the
assumptions and beliefs that inform their sense-making activity. In the above narrative
concerning the dispersement of the Orsognese to other “quieter regions of Italy,” Signora
A reveals an implicit assumption that people living together, participating in and sharing
the experience of the town’s life, constitute the “social nucleus” of the community, which,
because of the military orders for evacuation and dispersement, was “melting” away.
Though unstated, cultural propositions make clear the assumptions and beliefs that
informed the logic by which Signora A interprets that experience.
What makes an experience memorable? What do narrators tell us about
their convictions, beliefs, and values in the sense of something intrinsic and essential to
themselves? It seems to me that the act of remembering is a choosing, a highlighting, a
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shaping, and an enshrinement, even when what one recollects is devastating. This is seen
in accounts of events in 1943 in letters Signora B wrote to her son, who was a soldier in
the Italian army. She never sent the letters. She said that even if she had known where he
was she still had no faith that the letters would reach him. Signora B said she wrote the
letters as a way to maintain her hope that there would be an end to the war and as a way
to remember who she was. Signora B's letters emit many different messages and different
kinds of messages. By identifying the several concepts in which they are framed, and by
identifying a characteristic type of message in terms of the several concepts in which they
are framed, I hope to map the various relationships among the concepts.
Sensemaking is neither static nor determinate. Cultural meaning systems
project different perspectives, which depend on a wide range of variables that include such
factors as age, gender, socioeconomic status. All social actors exist within a context. It
seems to me that the letter that follows is a particularly rich source of data because its text
draws attention to its own processes of meaning production, making these processes its
subject.
Letter from Signora B to her son May 15, 1944
With the permission of the authorities we went to our house; we went there with a trembling joy, as if we were just paying a visit to a dear person; we returnedgrieved.... We had to go through the war zone where there was no admittance; entering from the only opening through the barbed wire, we were watched by a sentry. What we could see was a scene of devastation; all the shutters of rooms turned to the sea and the shutter by the study had been taken away so that the windows looked enormous, empty, deserted; in the other rooms, the switches had been taken away, the main entrance had been broken into. Everything had been turned upside down, shattered and made useless. I caimot tell you then what happened to that little garden and kitchen we cared for. Here some horses had been left to graze freely, so that they fed on everything in the garden, they dirtied and spoiled
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everything, the sheep ate the sorrel plants, the little lilac shrubs had their sprouts devoured, the vines have disappeared and so on...
Order is a concept important to Signora B as she attempted to make sense
of what was happening. Signora B draws upon cultural knowledge to configure the
meaning—the intensity of affect she experiences as she tells her son about what occurred.
She gives an account of the disorder fi-amed in terms of the destruction of familiar order.
She engages in a process of representing the world to the consciousness of her son who
will “recognize” the full thrust of the meanings she has encoded. It is not so much that the
horses and sheep “graze fireely” as it is a matter of what the grazing means—disorder due
to her absence as “padroncf^—^nd the cultural premises that are invoked in response to
that sort of behavior. Furthermore, when one considers the situation in which Signora B
finds herself, it is possible to look at war and see how it mobilizes, articulates, and
modifies the meanings available to people as they enter its bewildering reality. Signora B
conveys her experience to us ; war shreds one’s existential core. To physically die is but
one kind of death. She describes a multiplicity of “deaths,” especially, social death, when
the various contexts of belonging and participation are shattered.
Though three years have passed since I first read Signora B’s letter to her
son, I am still struck by her subdued outrage and the indignity she felt at the disorder she
encountered upon re-entering her home. It is her expectation that order could be
maintained that I find most compelling. To leave, to abandon her home and the things
within that depended on her skills as a chatelaine was not her choice. Order can be
brought to disorder; what Signora B describes is not simply disorder. It is bedlam, chaos
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replacing what is “supposed to be”: “... Everything had been turned upside down,
shattered and made useless.”
Beyond mere physicality, the rooms in Signora B’s home were contexts,
space that had been shaped by the social interactions of family and friends. The house and
possessions needed care and attention in order to provide the inhabitants with the
ambiance people require of their homes. She kept things inside and out “domesticated” in
the strict sense of the word. The “free” grazing of horses and sheep indicates wildness.
This ascendancy of the undomesticated is even more forcefully conveyed by her
description of the little “lilac shrubs” whose “sprouts” the “freely” grazing horses and
sheep devoured. Signora B seemed to feel anguish and tenderness toward the shrubs, as if
they were human. Undoubtedly, in ordinary circumstances, the sheep would never have
been permitted to graze among the shrubs. And yet, that is precisely what is so intriguing
about her commentary: the time and circumstances were unprecedented. Yet, she reacted
out of the expectation o f regularity and, in anguish, she finds only bedlam.
Signora B wove her narrative with a dense prose that speaks to a variety of
relationships, the most obvious being the house as person. These metaphors are not
immanent in the situation itself but are encoded in her subjectivity. She endows and
encodes meaning through her use of figurative languie. My use of the term “metaphor”
follows that espoused by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who see much of ordinary language
as metaphorical extensions of concepts that are grounded in experience. Thus, the
richness of metaphor lies in the fact that the application of words from one domain of
experience—such as “little” to signify a child and the vulnerability of that child—to
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another, in the case of the “little lilac shrubs,” makes available selected pieces of an
organized knowledge structure appropriate to that experience for use in conceptualizing
another sort of experience. Thus, the “truth” of what happened undergoes a
transformation into experience via the individual, subjective response to event. The‘T ’
reported, and mediated, the reality of the war through metaphor.
One way to approach the narratives is to conceptualize them as illustrations
of the way the Orsognese appropriate events to conform to a system of meaning that both
defines and fi-ames their perception of reality. As such, the narratives of the women
present anomalous war episodes whose meanings are embedded in the cultural institutions
that shaped the community of Orsogna and the social and political economy of everyday
life there.
For me, being in Orsogna made it possible to recognize the importance of
engaging the whole narrative simultaneously fi-om a number of different angles. Each
perspective contributed toward the total interpretation. The women I interviewed spoke
to me as authors who actively and visibly created, rather than passively recited, their
recollections. The voices as recorded in the narratives are simultaneously retrospective,
creative, interpretive, and reconstructive.
Women described their behavior during the war in terms of their social
roles as mothers, daughters, and sisters. Initially, I assumed that the pre-eminence of
social roles implied a conception of self that was oriented toward others rather than
toward a self conceived as independent, autonomous, and bounded. During the
interviews, women appeared unable to separate themselves as individuals fi-om their
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various social relationships. I noted in my journal that listening to women’s narratives was
analogous to being involved in an “archaeology of subjectivity”: the narratives presented a
layered stratigraphy of meaning, more than I could impart in a single enterprise.
My field experience in Orsogna confirmed the impression of Orsogna I had
gleaned fi’om listening to and reading old letters and diaries. The collectivity that is
Orsogna seemed to me not homogeneous, in the sense of the interchangeability of its
members. Rather, the community seemed to be constituted of clu sters of families linked
together in lateral netw orks that assumed a community of particular shared objectives.
Letter written by Signora B to her son September 25, 1943
.. . that this painful very laborious life continues, living is taken up with material concerns... . The most important thing is to stop this brutal life. To have the possibility of returning to our sweet home! Do you think somebody will care about that?
The use of harsh terms such as “brutal” and “laborious” highlights the
strong feelings she experienced in response to the disruption. Signora B is not responding
merely to the situation and circumstances of living within a war zone. Rather, she protests
the kind of life—“living is taken up with material concerns”—she must endure. The
“material concerns” she refers to are the continuous, ever-present preoccupation with
survival: food, shelter, water, safety, and the rest. These are the sorts of things that drain
her energy. Many of the narrators expressed similar repugnance at what they described as
a “primitive life,” a life devoid of sociability. For many of these women, life had become a
return to the primordial stew, where raw survival rationalized all sorts of behavior. They
described themselves as being “reduced” to an inferior form of life, of living “like
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animals.” Notice the solution Signora B proposes. To be permitted to return to her house
would make it possible to re-institute order and once again participate in a social world.
Letter written by Signora B to her son October 11,1943
.... I am very sad because after the hope of coming back home soon, I still see myself wandering in uncertainty, with the prospect of a winter separated and solitary. Oh, if you could return and find your home, if it is not the same, then at least similar to the home it had once been. I would see the face of your happiness . . .
“Wandering in uncertainty, with the prospect of a winter separated and
solitary” conveys the searing sense of loss felt when one’s way of life has been destroyed.
Again, she longs for the return of her son and her home, which somehow will make things
right.
Letter written by Signora B to her son December 23, 1943
.... We had the first fall of snow. On the terrace some pigeons continue their sweet, family existence, though they are mortified. However, despite the many ups and downs I have had to pass through I succeed in carrying with me my dear little animals which, if I am right are symbolic. I can still look after them: I wish you could see them. They are among the very rare, kinds of things you can still find at home . . .
The social center(s) where Signora B engages in activities and practices
with respect to one another and in doing so, endows them with ethical or moral
significance, no longer exists. An awareness of these social centers transforms a series of
activities and practices, giving them regularity and making them salient. Caring for her
pigeons provides her with an alternative, one that draws on her caretaker identity; in
consequence, she manages a reconstruction of “what is supposed to be.” Looking after
the pigeons is something familiar within a world where “everything is upside down and
made useless.”
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The meanings Signora B constructs within her narratives are multilayered
because she—the discerning self of the narrating‘T ’—is herself a multilayered self shaped
by social interactions. Her narratives reveal a “subjective self’—a self that is presented and
displayed in a concrete sequence of action—and the self who invests linguistic pronouns
with cultural meaning—biographical, emotional, and ideological. Revealing the
components of Signora B’s sense-making involves understanding multiple meanings, their
sources, and the seamless web of consciousness they make up. Thus, it seems to me that
narratives are more than a discussion of events. Facts and events are inscribed in patterns
that relate to their sociosymbolic content and that reflect, through complex processes,
their subjectivity.
Letter written by Signora B to her son December 24, 1943
.... It’s Christmas eve, a poor sad Christmas. All around a big silence reigns. We do not hear the bells ringing. . .. And where are you? How are you spending this night: are you also assaulted by your memories?... Memories, thoughts, longings. I can see our dining room all lit up by the nice chandelier of wrought iron, I can see the radio which sends a shepherd’s lullaby and most of alll can see you, handsome, flourishing and alive. I see you at ease and follow you with my eyes ...
I engage the narrator’s moral language describing fulfilling or failing to
fulfill obligations of social roles and identities, as exemplified in the letter above. I attend
to the narrator’s process of self-description and self-appraisal. What are the implied or
explicit “shoulds,” or standards, present within the narrative?
Signora B’s phrase “assaulted by memories” is particularly noteworthy. It
is an example of metastatement: comments offered by narrators about their own thoughts
or something said. Metastatements can also be seemingly innocuous descriptions, such as
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Signora B’s use of the phrase “nice chandelier.” Metastatements provide insight into
those categories the narrator is using to monitor her thoughts so that her expression is
culturally communicative. I follow patterns that indicate internal consistency or
contradictions about recurring themes and the way the themes relate to one another. I
notice how Signora B represents the important issues in her life and how she balances her
needs against the needs of others.
What principle or rule of meaning could have required a woman to author
this letter in this way? It seems to me that the key phrase is “And where are you?” Of all
holidays, Christmas is the most sacred family celebration in Orsogna. Relatives, especially
sons and daughters, return home for Christmas. Not only is her son not able to be home
for Christmas in 1943, but she has no idea where he is, something that under normal
circumstances would be a violation of norms. Even family members who have migrated to
other European countries, or overseas, return home or call on Christmas. Here Signora B
once again notes how things are the opposite of what they should be, a theme central to
the sentiments expressed within her letters. The second component of this theme is that
“everything is made useless.” Family Christmas celebrations require the manifestions of
multiple social identities and gender roles. This is especially true for women. Each of the
following kin terms for social ties through blood and marriage encode very specific
relationships that are most formally manifested at gatherings during Christmas: m am a
(mother); suocera (mother-in-law), nona (grandmother), nipotirta (granddaughter),
(daughter), nuora (daughter-in-law), sorella{ sister), cogwa/u(sister-in-law), m oglie
(wife), padrona (mistress of the household), zia (aunt), a/g7/ra(cousin),m adrina (god
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mother), ^g//occ/o (god-daughter), nipote (niece), com are (close friend with whom you
talk and gossip). I mention each because unlike kinship terminology in American culture
(including Italian-American kinship) that stresses the nuclear family, Italian kin
terminology (blood, marriage, and fictive) is quite extensive. Besides the number of
terms, the duties, rights, and obligations associated with each status are expected to be
manifested in a formal manner. For example, Christmas is a holiday shared with patrilineal
relatives while New Year’s Eve is generally celebrated with matrilineal relatives. The
Epiphany (celebrated on January 6“* ) is the time for gift exchanges, especially between
adults and children. It is also the occasion when godchildren visits their godparents
(especially godmothers) and bring them gifts. Visiting one’s godparents is a sign of
respect and far more important than bringing a gift, which is usually some small token of
affection. It is also interesting to note that the Italian term for godfather and owner, or
male head of household, are the same, padrona. However, the term for godmother and
female head of household are different: the former is m adrina and the latter is padrona.
Actually, there is no English-languade term for padrona and the English gloss, “mistress”
or “female head of household,” are inadequate designations. Perhaps the word that most
closely connotes the meanings encoded in the term is the French word “chatelaine.”
This discussion about family, Christmas, and gender roles enhances our
ability to really grasp the dislocation experienced by Signora B, and indeed other women,
during that Christmas of 1943. “Everything is made useless” conveys a myriad of
messages about the way the women construed their experience. The term Christmas,
which to me represents designation of a holiday whose celebration is shaped by the
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material, consumer orientation of my culture, is not what Signora B means to convey.
Christmas for Orsognese women is an ontological experience: it is a time to “be” rather
than a time to “do.” That is not to say that Orsognese women do not consider the holiday
as a time for “doing.” Indeed, there is considerable work in preparation for the holiday.
The point I make, however, is that the effort entailed is not disassociated from social roles
and identities as it tends to be in American culture. Rather, the work and effort associated
with the holiday is treated as an expression of women’s sociability.
Thus, the substance of my second claim emerges from the narratives:
notions of sociability and relatedness are central to the way Orsognese women construe
themselves and others. Sociability and relatedness are not only categories; they are
integral to the cultural matrix and are not, as they may at first seem, a jumble of
observations, values, and practices. The way Orsognese women construed their
experience and organized their knowledge of social life was manifested by their
expectations of themselves and others.
Although their focus is different, both Signora A and Signora B lament the
dissolution of their “ social context,” by which I mean the meanings that people produce
and act on when they do things together. Sociability and relatedness were key elements in
the Orsognese narrative. The concepts are ontological; that is, they represent a mode of
being that the Orsognese say is characteristic of them. To suggest that the “sociability” of
the self is manifested by choosing the appropriate action, in the appropriate context, and
under the appropriate circumstances tends to reduce Orsognese ontology to situational
ethics. Sociability of the self does not refer to a chameleon-like quality, a change in nature
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under different circumstances. Rather, it is stable and solid, a gyroscope set by an
unquestioned sense of the self as worthwhile.
In part, the centrality of sociability as the essential nature of self and selves
seems to indicate autonomy in the sense that “I am I and not you.” However, I think it is
a mistake to attribute to this sense o f‘T ’ autonomy or independence in the bounded sense
common to Anglo-American concepts of self. Their sense of sociability permits
Orsognese women to conceptualize self as both bounded and permeable. Those concerns
that cross the boundary do not dilute the centered‘T’ of a women’s sense of autonomy.
Rather, there seems to be a process of deliberation, in which women weigh the presenting
concern in terms of sustaining sociability, this “social-self,” and of responding in a manner
demanded by the vicissitudes of life lived in a community of others. Recall my previous
discussion about Rosa and Rocco in Chapter 3. For Rosa, the pre-arranged rendezvous
outside of Orsogna was an accommodation consonant with her sense of worth, however
consciously defined, and, most importantly, consonant with what is required by her, given
the social situation in which she is placed.
Once I asked Regina what it meant to be Orsognese. She replied, “Well,
you share experiences, you participate in what happens in life.” What I find striking in her
response is the characterization of membership as something made, not a given. When I
asked her to elaborate, to help me as an outsider to understand, she said that it meant “to
belong to the community.” I understood her to mean that belonging had something to do
with membership and that membership implied knowledge, so I asked her: “How do you
know that someone belongs?” Regina said, “A person knows the ways of Orsogna.”
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Regina used the verb conoscere to signify “to know” and not the verb sapere. While both
verbs mean to know, there is a subtle but important difference between them that
determines the speaker’s choice of which to use. Speakers use sapere to signify “knowing
how” or “knowing about.” The verb sapere also connotes knowledge acquired or
knowledge learned as the result of effort or action. For example, to say in Italian, “I know
how to speak Italian,” I would say: So parlare Italiano. On the other hand, if I wanted to
say in Italian, “He knows me,” I would say. Lui mi conosce.
The verb conoscere is distinguished from the verb sapere in a particular
way—not only in the type of knowledge or the means of acquiring knowledge signified.
Rather, the choice depends upon the existential stance of the social actor. The verb
conoscere connotes ontological knowledge while sapere refers to knowledge that
becomes a part of the persona, as an attribute. Sapere infers knowledge or skill learned
and acquired—the direction of learning from the social world to the internal persona. The
direction is reversed for the verb conoscere. Conoscere connotes subjective knowledge
that informs and transforms the persona because it stems from social experience and
interaction. More importantly, it constitutes the basis for social interaction. Regina said
that to belong is to be rooted in the knowledge of how to manage daily life, to be skilled in
daily activities that are varied and strategic, that are dependent on context.
Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus”—an invisible scheme of categorization and
perception, an unconscious cultural competence—is relevant here (Bourdieu 1977). The
nature of sociability is constitutive of community because it is through social relationships
and exchanges of various kinds that people acknowledge others and employ
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knowledgeability to mediate between social structures, in the sense of relationships
between individuals and groups of individuals forged through social institutions, and social
practice. I use the term “knowledgeability” because it connotes cultural competence as
both “knowledge that” and “knowledge of how.”
Aware of this distinction, particularly with respect to how the
communicative context shapes the speaker’s choice of verb, I was able to understand why
women who were not native to Orsogna but came to the community as brides would
identify themselves as “not of Orsogna.” They wondered whether that fact would make
them ineligible for an interview about their wartime experiences. One aspect of the
charged nature of cultural identity appears to be that in claiming identity—I am Orsognese-
-one does not merely associate the self with a set of specific characteristics; one also
distances oneself fi"om others. Membership within the community appears to have less to
do with time and more to do with how you know what you know and what you do with
what you know. Thus, it seems that to be Orsognese implies (1) a kind of cultural
competence in making meaning in ways that are understandable and significant to other
Orsognese and (2) a capacity to make the social world salient to one’s self
Letter written by Signora B to her son September 13, 1944
.. . The devastation continues: the civil burglars enter and remove everything which is removable: pipes, electric wires etc. I no longer expect to return to our home soon. I want to begin to tidy up, to make it fit for use again, of taking care of it, to cure it, Uke a dear fiiend . . .
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How does Signora B present an unprecedented experience? What sorts of
events—acts, scenes, agencies—carry moral significance? Notice the way an
unprecedented experience—war and evacuation—mobilized, articulated, and modified the
measures of signification available to Signora B, who had to confi'ont its bewildering
reality. Her self-reflection is not just a private, subjective act. The categories and
concepts she uses for reflecting upon and evaluating her circumstances came fi’om a
cultural context, historically situated. An exploration of the language and meaning
Signora B used to articulate her own experiences reveals an awareness of the social forces
and institutions, often conflicting, that constitute women’s subjectivity. Her letter
provides an opportunity to examine how women act to re-structure or preserve their
orientations, their relationships, and their social context.
How do narrators in their interpretation of events and their expressions of
personal dispositions illuminate shared orientations of the community? When the narrator
relates events, she invokes a kind of relationship in the mind of the listener, and, to the
extent the listener participates in the conversation, he or she sanctions the narrator’s way
of organizing reality as well as the very existence of the components making up that
reality. When I recall all that Signora C told me about what she endured during the war, I
still find it remarkable that she presented herself as “unremarkable.” Once I told her that I
thought she was very courageous and she replied, “I had my son, Nicola, what was I
supposed to do?” In effect, she was “unremarkable” because she was behaving normally,
“naturally.” She behaved as she was expected to behave, as a “mother,” and thus she
experienced very little ambiguity about her course of action. This lack of ambiguity is a
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characteristic not only in Signora C’s recollections but also in the letters of Signora B,
whose expressions of concern seem to reflect her identify as padrona. These women, as
well as the others I interviewed, represented themselves as individuals with purpose. No
matter the differences in the types of experiences recounted, the message about self-
concept never changed. The tenor of women’s narratives always seemed to convey, “We
lacked this so we did that.” Never did women convey to me the opposite; “We lacked this
so we did not do that.”
Behaving in concert with her social role as mother and sister-in-law not
only ensured the physical survival of mother and son but also it ensured Signora C’ s
social survival, as a member of a community who could command the esteem of others
because her behavior reflected favorably on the community as a whole. She and others in
their recollections invoked ideas of relatedness as the means to construe what significance
the event had for them at the time and has had for them during the course of their lives. It
is not simply the case that Orsognese women construe themselves as embodied social roles
but that their social world is organized to support this view.
On another occasion. Signora C recounted the story about her husband’s
return to Orsogna in 1946 (approximately 13 years after he left the town to join the Italian
army). Her husband was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Scotland during the final three
years of the war. She told me that upon his return she gave him the accumulated fiuits of
her wits and labor: com, oil, and money. I asked her what Signore C did with the money?
Now, reflecting on my question, it appears to me that I interpreted her account to be an
account of personal achievement. When she said that he bought a new suit of clothes, my
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reaction was unleashed in one word: “Incredible!” Apparently Signora C recognized that
his action didn’t make sense to me for she rushed to explain that nothing he needed to do
in Orsogna for the family could have been accomplished in tattered clothes. The new suit
was a necessary symbol to manipulate situations in order to redress the family’s desolate
circumstances.
A person’s behavior is context-dependent and strategic. That is, one’s
behavior is the practical means available to discern meanings and to understand how the
context works. A social actor’s behavior tells us what those relationships are that she or
he perceives and what it is about those relationships that necessitates a particular response
in any context. Hallo well’s notion of a “behavioral environment” in which objects,
actions, and events gain significance through a process of cultural interpretation is the kind
of “context” I mean (Hallowell 1967). I refer to Hallowell’s work because it helps me
focus on just how and in what contexts people do formulate conscious interpretations of
their social experience. This is not to say that because culture is shared there are no
variations in interpretations. What I stress is that commonality of behavior does occur
within any social group because each social actor has the means of acting as a judge of
others and of herself or himself (Bourdieu 1977, 17). The hypothesis that informs the
work of this chapter aligns my Orsognese analysis directly with the points of Hallowell and
Bourdieu. Regular patterns of behavior occur as a result of practices generated in social
interaction. Through judgment and assessment of the effects of what one’s self and others
have done, individuals in a social group move toward a consensus of meaning: systematic
conceptual dispositions arise that accommodate subjective and objective patterns of sense
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making. Each of the narrators taps the common core of meaning—of what it is to be
Orsognese; but at no point has she become submerged in it. Her individuality, her
subjectivity, distinctions, personal metaphors are original, a signature of autonomy. The
individual’s meaning-making begins, like the work of the poet, in individual action or
reaction, but the substance of it is woven out of the cultural matrix in which she functions.
A third claim I make on the basis of these narratives is that experience and
the expression of self-appraisal are not separable from the cultural scenarios in which they
emerge. The account of Signora G analyzed below illustrates not only her identity, as of
the others, with the totality of the Orsognese war experience—her emergence from its
crucible, so to speak; but it will also show the manner in which she projects a moral
judgment onto one of their number. An individual tragedy is fitted naturally into the
Orsognese experience in a way that makes it a direct derivative of the group’s core values.
Part n. Le SfoUamento
The narrative that follows was obtained during fieldwork. The narrator
was given the same direction as the two narrators in the previous section: Tell me about
your experiences during the war. Invariably, narrators used le sfollcmento (dispersal,
dispersion) as the initiating event to contextualize their narration. It is important to note
that the women I interviewed, along with the women and men I encountered while living
in Orsogna, never used the the term I'evacuamento (evacuation) when they spoke about
the events beginning in November 1943 and ending in June 1944.
Earlier, I described the terror experienced by the Orsognese as a result of
the battles fought in Orsogna during late November and early December 1943. Before the
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Orsognese could be “liberated,” physical death—as a consequence of combat between the
opposing armies and as a consequence of the ruthlessness of their German occupiers—was
probable. However, it is the evacuation as an experience of “social death” that the
Orsognese women invariably describe. Le ^ollcanento is treated less as a common sense
action undertaken for safety and more as an action of coercion that results in the rupture
of social life and the fragmentation of their social community. By their use of the term
^o lla m en to and of the static verb sfo lla re, Orsognese convey their perception of
evacuation as an event that dissolved their social world. In North American culture, there
is a tendency to trust and agree to the state’s power (national and local) to order
evacuation as something for the community’s best interest. Thus, concerns about the
legitimacy of the state’s right to order evacuations rarely become an issue. Even in peace
time, Italian distrust of the state and its agencies, whether fascist or democratic, is well
documented. Under normal circumstances, the Orsognese would question the power and
legitimacy of any external agent to force an evacuation. Even more intensely would they
resist an order issued by those whom they considered occupiers. In the following
narrative. Signora G implies that the coercion that forced evacuation also forced Signora
G, her family, and other Orsognese to abandon their homes. Signora G’s use of the verb
abbandonare (to be forelom or forsaken) implies an evaluation of moral significance, even
more than is conveyed by the English verb “to abandon,” which denotes a willful
abrogation of one’s responsibilities. The Italian verb zbbandom re denotes a rupture in a
relationship that causes what is in one’s care to be forsaken or neglected. In Italian, the
use of the verb abbandonare comments on the state of being—forlorn and forsaken—on
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that which is given up due to an abnipt, unilateral ending of the relationship. The moral
connotation signified by abbandonare is particularly important to an understanding of
what Signora G means, since it infers a negative assessment of an action taken within a
social universe where how one acts toward others is measured as an indication of
character. It is therefore not surprising that the women begin their narratives by
describing conditions that required them to act in ways that violated what they felt they
ought to do. The agency that explains the evacuation is not their choice but resides in the
enforcement capabilities of the German occupied force in Orsogna. Yet, the breaking of a
norm implies a potential liability to some blame. It is the need to address the issue of
liability that appears to orient the recollection of the narrators.
Narrative, Signora G
On December 23 rd, after a hard fight against the English on the streets of Orsogna, the Germans ordered me and my family, with those who were dispersed from the quarters o f Cerratina and San Basile, to abandon our home and to form columns because, they told us, we should go further away from the war front. In a hurry, without having the chance to prepare some provisions, we joined all the others and on foot we proceeded along the country paths, toward Viano. I recall that a long column of people was formed; there were hundreds and hundreds of us and, like derelicts, we proceeded unaware of the destination; my fear was that all the members of my family stayed close to me and that they would not get separated. At one point we realized that we were left in the last group of the column and without the surveillance of the German soldiers who had moved to the front [of the column]. There was a sudden decision made to separate from the column and hoping for the best with God’s help, to stop, and if they hadn’t noticed our absence, to go back. And that is what we did, and in the dark, we found ourselves in an abandoned home—the owner was forced to evacuate—situated under a high embankment, in the valley of the outlying section of Lenzetta di Filetto. We counted ourselves; there were one hundred and fifty people and we stayed there until June 8th. The life we led during those harsh months was terrible, dreadful, they were months of primitive lifestyle, without food supplies, without wood to keep warm, without clothes to change into. We lived day by day, without thinking of
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the future; we got used to that lifestyle of primitive men. We slept on the floor, we ate grass gathered in the fields and cooked as well as possible without seasoning; the women passed their days praying and saying the rosary; the men worked for the Germans who made them dig trenches for soldiers and for communication [observation posts]. Fear was constantly present, not only because of the constant visits by the German who were often drunk and not always willing to let us remain in that house. But also because the bombardments were relentless. The shells exploded all around us with great reverberation. We were forced to remain indoors at all times because we could have been hit at any moment. There was also a victim [of the bombardment] among us in the person of Salvatore D. One day he decided to go to visit a fiiend who had evacuated a few kilometers fi'om our house [the farmhouse where the group took refuge], in the area of San Martino. Using as an excuse for his unusual visit the wish to find, at his fiiend’s house, some wine and some oil, he reassured his wife saying that if he had not returned that evening, it meant that he accepted the hospitality offered and remained there for the evening. He told her not to worry. The evening passed and the day after and the following day, when some of our men wandered off for about one hundred meters to relieve themselves. Along the side of the road, they noticed the lifeless body of Salvatore, who had been hit by shrapnel released by the exploding shells, when he left the house a few days ago. I remember his wife’s despair, the difficulty of giving him a respectable burial: We found two planks of wood to cover him ; we dug a hole and placed him there in the same place where he had died. In reality we were fortunate in the misfortune because thepaescoti, those who also left the column and took refuge in the caves had a life that was more miserable and dangerous than we had.
Narrative, Signora G, Segment 1 Analysis
II23 dicembre, dopo un duro scontro con gli inglesi per le vie di Orsogna, i tedeschi ordinarono a me, alia mia famiglia, unitamente a quelli che erano dislocati nelle contrade Cerratina and San Basile, di abbandonare la nostra abitazione di incolonnarci perche, ci dissero, dovevamo andare loniano dalfronte di querra.
Translation:
On December 23 rd, after a hard fight against the English on the streets of Orsogna, the Germans ordered me and my family, together with those who were d isp la ced in the quarters of Cerratina and San Basile, to abandon our home and to form columns because, they told us, we should go further away from the war front.
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Signora G’s narrative of events from December 23, 1943, to June 8, 1943,
is structured by the way she selects, orders, and links information, all of which depend on
inferences she draws from various unstated cultural propositions. Signora G uses the verb
ordinare (to order) to indicate the nature of the agency—coercion and intimidation-that
compelled her and other Orsognese to evacuate. Dispersion and displacement. Signora G
tells us, were imposed upon them by others whose power and position, as we shall see in
the following sections and narratives, offered them only a choice between obedience and
death. Coercion as a reason for evacuation takes on even greater significance if
consideration is given to what is implied, unstated, and alternatives of what could have
been said. For example. Signora begins her narrative by giving the date she and others left
Orsogna, which implies a resistance to evacuation in late November and early December,
when the British Eighth Army offensive began. It is her leaving of Orsogna and not her
remaining in Orsogna in the midst of battle that she and other narrators feel compelled to
explain. Nor does she refer to her departure from Orsogna in terms other than d islocati
(displacement, dispersal) such as “leaving,” “fleeing,” “escaping,” as one might commonly
expect.
In order to comprehend the intense power of Signora G’s utterance
ordinarono, it is important to appreciate the multivocality of the verb. First, the verb
ordinare has several different denotations (to command, to decree, to ordain, to order, to
set in order, to arrange), all of which characterize an agent that has unchallengable power
over others. Second, Signora G uses the verb in the first person plural form, which
connotes the concept of “we” and “our” to convey an action as inclusive of other
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Orsognese beyond those members of her family. Typically in spoken and written Italian,
the personal pronoun is dropped; the verb form used indicates both person and number.
When she says “... ordinarono a me, alia mia famiglia, unitamente a quelli che erano
dislocati nelle contrade Cerratina and San Basile, di abbandonare la nostra abitazione,"
Signora G makes clear that the category “we” includes herself and her family together
with {unitamente) those others who were evacuated. By so doing, I suggest that Signora
G situates her narrator’s voice as someone who is re-presenting events and experiences as
someone who is a member of a community or as a representative of the community, one
who has the authority to tell about what happened “to us,” rather than as a person within
the community who describes what happened to “me” and “mine.”
I suggest that membership as a significant component of meaning-making
carries over in Signora G ‘s statement: “.. . abbandonare la nostra (our)
abitazione{comm\xxnt^ of residence, dwelling).” The explicit reference of the term
abitazione is the place or community within which one resides. Unstated is the premise
that membership in a place or community implies relationships. At first glance, the
premise might seem simplistic or self-evident; but, upon fiirther examination, drawing
upon cross-cultural examples, the simplistic nature of the premise proves to be deceptive.
For instance, when Americans are asked where they live, their response is one which
identifies place as a geographical location. It is also true that by naming the location,
Americans do not imply membership within a community. In such a case where
membership is meant, Americans generally address this by adding something to their
statement-“my family has lived there for decades”; “I grew up there”; “all my fiiends live
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there,” and so on—statements from which the listener can infer sets of on-going
relationships. Even in this case, the specified relationships are restrictive. One exception
that comes to mind, particularly in urban areas, concerns statements about
“neighborhood,” “the block,” or “the hood,” where a sense of belonging is emphasized
and where “knowing about others and things” is indicative of belonging. Another
exception might be found in small rural towns where, besides time, membership is marked
by a myriad of characteristics encompassing attributes that distinguish “us” from “them.”
Oddly enough, the urban indicators of membership, “knowing about others and things,”
predominates in rural areas as well. Still, in both cases, rural and urban, what is
emphasized is knowledge, not relationships. When an Orsognese is asked. Where do you
live, she or he will respond, “a O rsogna [I am of Orsogna].” Unstated but laden with
meaning is the proposition that the community is embodied through social relationships
and that I am constituted by and a constituent of those relationships. This is not to say
that Orsogna as location never enters the minds of the Orsognese. It is to make the claim,
however, that Orsognese construe membership in a community less as a physical place, a
place of residence, and more as the web of social bonds and relationships that constitute
the community.
The element of rupture introduced by Signora G’s mention of other
d islo ca ti (displaced people, displacement) flows through the entire narrative. In general,
events presented within any narrative are dealt with in terms of their unique
characteristics. Though unstated, rupture can be inferred as the affect experienced in
consequence of the evacuation. Forced to abandon their homes, the Orsognese do not
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merely leave behind material possessions; they leave behind a context in which they enact
certain social roles that define their identity. Signora G uses the expression ^''abbandonare
la nostra abitazione ” by which she implies not only where we live but how we live.
Moreover, their place within the community dissolves along with the kinds of reciprocal
exchanges and relationships that entail status. In a sense, evacuation dissolves the familiar
social universe and alters social bonds. In the segments of her narrative that follow.
Signora G shows the obvious human concern about the welfare of her “family,” since
under these life-threatening conditions safety and trust are necessary conditions for
assuring one’s survival. However, “the family” as the unit of resource and refuge is
expanded to include paesani, those others whose status as co-members of the community
establish relationships of obligation and entitlement between individuals no one other than
kin can claim under normal circumstances. Again, this observation about an expanded
category of “family” is not to be taken as a claim of harmony and cohesion. Several
factors come into play, including class and gender. My point, however, is made to call
attention to the apparent flexibility, albeit under extreme conditions, entailed in re-defining
what constitutes “tofa m ig lia ."
Here it is interesting to note one insight obtained fi-om the data, an insight
that challenges, if not contradicts, observations made in the anthropological literature on
Italy, particularly in the period between 1960 and 1985. In one way or another, nearly all
anthropologists working in Italy have focused on the dichotomy between the public and
private domains and the presumed conflicts of interest separating to fa m ig lia and the
community. Yet, Signora G’s comments appear to say something quite different. Besides
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her use of the inclusivela nostra, she seems to say that the status of dislocati dissolved all
other classifications and allegiances, and in this way all were the same, all were members
of the “Orsognese family.”
Narrative, Signora G, Segment 2 Analysis
In fretta, senza avere la possibilita di preparare qualche powista, ci unimmo a tutti gli altri e a piedi procedemmo lungo i sentieri di campagna, verso Viano. Ricordo che si fermo una colonna lughissima; eravamo centinaie e centinaia che, come derelitti, procedevamo senza connoscere la mota; la mia preoccupazione era che tutti I miei familiari stessero uniti tutti a me e non si sperdessero. Ad un certo momento ci accorgemmo di essere rimasti nel gruppo di coda e senza la sorveglianza dei soldati tedeschi che erano andati davanti. Ci fu una decisione improwisa, quella di staccarci dalla colonna e, se Dio ce I'avesse mandata buona, di fermarci e, se non avessero notati, di tomare indietro. Cosi facemmo e, nella oscurita a della sera, ci ritrovammo in una casa abbandonata (il proprietario era stato costretto a sfollare) situata sotto un alto ciglione, nella vallata della contrada Lenzetta di Filetto. Ci contammo: eravamo centocinquanta persone e li rimanemmo finno all '8 giugno. La vita che conducemmo in quei terribili mesi fu tremetida, terribile, furono mesi di vita primitiva, senza riserva di alimenti, senza legpa per riscaldarci, senza indumenti per cambiarci. Si viveva alia giornata, senza pensare piu al futuro; ci si abituo, a quella vita di genti primordiale.
Translation:
In a hurry, without having the chance to prepare some provisions, we joined all the others and on foot we proceeded along the country paths, toward Viano. I recall that a long column of people was formed; there were hundreds and hundreds of us and, like derelicts, proceeded unaware of the destination; my fear was that all the members of my family stayed close to me and that they would not get separated. At one point we realized that we were left in the last group of the column and without the surveillance of the German soldiers who had moved to the fi’ont [of the column]. There was a sudden decision made to separate fi’om the column and hoping for the best with God’s help, to stop, and if they hadn’t noticed our absence, to go back. And that is what we did, and in the dark, we found ourselves in an abandoned home—the owner was forced to evacuate —situated under a high embankment, in the valley of the outlying section of Lenzetta di Filetto. We counted ourselves; there were one hundred and
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fifty people and we stayed there until June 8th. The life we led during those harsh months was terrible, dreadful, they were months o f primitive lifestyle, withoutfood supplies, without wood to keep warm, without clothes to change into. We lived day by day, without thinking o f the future; we got used to that lifestyle o f primitive men.
Beyond mere chronology. Signora G describes a sequence of events that
explain the actions she took as a member o f a group. In this section of the narrative, there
is no sense of ally or enemy; there is only the impetus for survival. The central organizing
theme of Signora G’s narrative is one which explains how it came about that this group of
150 people were not dispersed to Northern Italy, as were the others in that long column,
and how they managed to survive during the six months in which the Germans and Allied
forces fought for control of Orsogna. It is a testimony about a shared fate and experience
cod about shared suffering, all of which endows Signora G with the authority to speak
about the war. Embedded within the sequence of events Signora G mentions are several
assumptions, beliefs, and rules that lend meaning to what she says but are presupposed—
taken for granted or otherwise left unstated. Not only was the evacuation not anticipated
by Signora G, but also, she assumes it will be temporary—just a few days in the country for
which, if she had the time, she could have taken some provisions fi’om home to provide for
their needs
When Signora G speaks about the long columns of people, she conveys her
recognition of the magnitude of the dispersal whose implications go far beyond that of
Orsogna. She appears to realize that displacement is pervasive, that there is really no
security anywhere, and that what was happening to her and other Orsognese was also
happening to others; “. . . Ricordo che si ferm o utia colonna lughissima; evavamo
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centiiunla e centinalia che, come derelitti, procedevamo senza connoscere la mota. [I
recall that a very long column of people had been formed; there were hundreds and
hundreds o f us and, like derelicts, we proceeded unaware o f the destination. Y What
makes this episode in her experience memorable? It seems to me that when Signora G
speaks about the Orsognese who formed those long columns walking toward an unknown
destination, she marks what is for her one of the many defining characteristics of the
dissolution of the social community. To gloss the Italian term d e re litti as the English
language term “derelicts” would be to remove the powerful evocative cultural significance
of the Italian term. In Anglo-American English, the term “derelict” carries the connotation
that someone has been neglectful of his or her duty. In English, “derelict” also connotes
something or someone left or abandoned by an owner or guardian. In both cases, the key
relationship is one of ownership or guardianship; the term reflects negatively on the
person’s character as it describes the abrogation of responsibility in ways not condoned by
society. For example, in American culture the term “derelict” is conventionally applied to
“street people,” be they alcoholics, homeless, or in some way infirm. In Italian, the term
carries an altogether different meaning. It refers exclusively to that which is abandoned,
either a person or an object—for example, a car, that is analogized as a person, in the sense
that one has left one’s car comme (like a) derelitto. In this sense, there is no clear
implication of a relationship either of ownership or guardianship. The term d erelitti marks
a state of being characterized by the rupture of social relationships that renders the other—
person or object—forsaken and lost.
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Moreover, besides the inferences derived by her use of the term d erelitti.
Signora G’s use of the terms senza connoscere la mota (not knowing) and la m ia
preoccipazione (worry, troubled, to have problems ) also implies that she perceived the
situation as harassing, even dangerous, in the sense that she felt no assurance that safety
and security would accrue to members of the column. Up to this point, the actions of
Signora G and others are taken with consideration given to the power of the German
soldiers to enforce obedience by use of their weapons. Although she does not mention it,
others who were part of the group witnessed the pistol execution of thirteen people who
refused to leave Orsogna. The movement of the soldiers to the front of the column meant
that Signora G and the others in her section were no longer under surveillance.
Signora G presents the break from the column into the countryside as a
matter of human action and judgment that require explanation. She specifies a
spontaneous decision made by the group in which they place their trust in God. The fact
that an individual or individuals may have first realized the opportunity for escape is less
important than her perception that the group acted in unison. Notice that in her testimony
the emphasis she places on the group—“that is what we did,” “we found ourselves,” “the
life we led”—situates herself within a community of others. Rather than an example of a
“muted” voice, I interpret Signora G’s voice as representative of what she perceived about
the circumstances and situation, neither of which were of her own making. Signora G
explains how it came to be that she and the others left the column, in terms she presumes
to be cogent, correct, and informative. Signora G represents events of a lived experience
that account for a state of affairs different from that experienced by others who remained
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in the column. She explains why she and others remain on the periphery of Orsogna while
other paesani were displaced or took refuge elsewhere. Signora G explicitly addresses
this in the last few lines of her narrative;
. . . In verita noi fiimmo, nella sventura, fortunati, perche gli altri paesani, quelli che erano riuscti in successivi incolormamenti a tomare indietro, come avevamo fatto noi, non trovarono altro ritugio che nelle grotte dove la vita fu piu pericolosa a piu misera . . .
In truth, we were fortunate in the misfortune because thepaesani, those who also left the column and took refuge in the caves had a life that was more miserable and dangerous than we had.
Here she acknowledges that as horrific as those six months where for her
and the others, the paesani had endured and suffered even more. Earlier I defined the
term p a esa n i as signifying a kin-like relationship entailing rights, duties, and obligations
that obtain as a result of membership within the community. No term exists in the English
language that even approximates its Italian connotation. To grasp the meaning intended
by Signora G, it is necessary to consider the category of “community” from the
perspective of an individual within the community. It has long been acknowledged that
not only are communities important repositories of symbols, but it is also generally agreed
that the symbols may be both material and immaterial, as well as ubiquitous and
polyphonic. Symbolic markers distinguish a given community from other communities.
However, the point I wish to make, that the community itself and everything within it,
conceptual and material, has a symbolic dimension, takes the symbolic dimension beyond
the notion of consensus of sentiment. The notion o f community exists as something for its
members “to think with.” Cohen puts it precisely;
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The symbols of community are mental contructs: they provide people with the means to make meaning. In so doing, they also provide them with the means to express the particular meanings which the community has for them .. . (Cohen 1985; 18)
The term paesani is but one o f many mental constructs by which the
Orsognese, as well as other Italians—particularly in rural areas—express the existence of
kin-like bonds (and all that that entails) between and among members of the community.
From the perspective of the Orsognese, the ^ollam ento happened to a community of
paesani, not of discrete family units. To consider the fate of paesani is equivalent to
considerations concerning the well-being of the members of one’s family. Indeed, for the
generation that witnessed war, survived dispersion, and returned to the ruin that was
Orsogna, the mutuality of these experiences solidified pre-existing bonds with paesani and
forged even stronger bonds, which in most cases, carmot be distinguished fi"om kinship.
All of this is to say that when Signora uses the term paesani, she is not merely referring to
a “type” of relationship. Rather, she is applying a mental construct with which she maps
her perceptions and imputes meaning to them; she is again evaluating the extent and
power of immaterial social bonds.
Throughout her narrative. Signora G recounts a lived experience that
accounts for what happened to “we Orsognese.” The decision to leave the column marks
a turning point in the narrative. Prior to this. Signora G represented actions as something
that happened, consequences as the result of a powerful external agency, the German
soldiers, who accompanied the column. The “sudden decision” to escape into the
countryside reverses the locus of power and situates it within the group, thus enabling her
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to speak about whatwe did to survive and about those conditions which characterized the
nature o f survival.
It is in the next section that Signora G begins to reveal the essential
qualities of her experience as she lived it. Signora G speaks in terms that reveal unstated
premises that convey not only the intensity of her feelings but also the processes of
engagement that characterized the existence of the group of which she was a member. So
rich in texture and the construction of meaning. Signora G’s testimony bears repeating;
Narrative, Signora G, Segment 3 Analysis
La vita che conducemmo in quei terribili mesi fu tremenda, terrible, furono mesi di vita primitiva, senza riserva di alimenti, senza legna per riscaldarci, senza indurenti per cambiarci. Si viveva alia giomata, senza pensari piu al futuro; ci si abituo a quella vita di gente primordiale. Si dormiva per terra, si mangiava erba raccolta nei campi e cotta alia men peggio senza condimento; le donne trascorrevano la giomata pregcmdo recitando rosari, gli uomini, lavorando agli ordini dei tedeschi che facwvano loro scavare trincee e cammuKonenti; la paura era sempre presente, non solo per le continue visite deei tedeschi spesso ubriachi e non sempre disposti a farci rimanere in quella casa, ma anche per I continui cannoneggiamenti i cuie proiettili con grande gragore scoppiavano in quelle campagne.
Translation
We found ourselves in an abandoned home-the owner was forced to evacuate—situated under a high embankment, in the valley of the outlying section of Lenzetta di Filetto. We counted ourselves; there were one hundred and fifty people and we stayed there until June 8th. The life we led during those harsh months was terrible, dreadful, they were months of primitive lifestyle, without food supplies, without wood to keep warm, without clothes to change into. We lived day by day, without thinking of the future; we got used to that lifestyle of primitive people. We slept on the floor, we ate grass gathered in the fields and cooked as well as possible without seasoning; the women passed their days praying and saying the rosary; the men worked for the Germans who made them dig trenches for soldiers and for communication [observation posts]. Fear was constantly present, not only because of the constant visits by the Germans who were
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often drunk and not always willing to let us remain in that house. But also because the bombardments were relentless. The shells exploded all around us with great reverberation. We were forced to remain indoors at all times because we could have been hit at any moment.
Others who were with Signora G or who had similar experiences form an
interpretive community that shares knowledge of categories, propositions, and
assumptions; they can make the bridging inferences to fully grasp what Signora G means
by her reference to “primordial” life, and to her statement “... we got used to that lifestyle
of primitive people.” Because other Orsognese share the same cultural premises, they can
be said to form an interpretative consensus in that they not only grasp what Signora G
means but they share the social meanings that lead them to similar interpretations.
Meaning is always meaning for someone, since every utterance carries a (tacit) guarantee
of relevance, a guarantee that what has been said to the reader or listener is relevant
enough to forge inferences. As the previous discussion illustrates, an utterance means far
more than it says and carries information about cultural beliefs and knowledge systems
that constitute the significance of what is meant by the speaker’s expression.
Signora G’s reference to living a “primordial” life is a useful place to begin
an analysis of this passage. Her statement, “La vita che conducemmo in quei terribili
mesi fu tremenda, terrible, furono mesi di vita primitiva, senza riserva di alimenti, senza
legna per riscaldarci, senza indurenti per cambiarci [The life we led during those harsh
months was terrible, dreadful, they were months of primitive lifestyle, without food
supplies, without wood to keep warm, without clothes to change into]” appears to depend
for its meaning on her perception that the quality of life, a type of engagement in the world
that confi’onted her and the others during those six months, was in her estimation an
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existence analogous to that of “primitive” people. What is it that is apparent to Signora G
about this experience that causes her to describe it in these terms? Recall that a similar
reference is made by Dr. Silveri (see Chapter 1, Part II, The Battle for Orsogna), when he
described the conditions in Orsogna in December 1944. He said the population still lived
in “... caves, cellars, like troglodytes without aid, and without assistance.” Thus, I can
infer that Dr. Silveri’s use of the term “troglodytes” is in some way associated with the
unstated premises Signora G draws upon to encode meaning in her statement.
In the above excerpt. Signora G uses vtrhs—conducemmo, viveva, pensare,
mangiava—to depict active processes and cognitive activities that imply some degree of
conscious awareness. One notable aspect of Signora G’s verb choice is the way in which
each verb denotes personal agency as the source o fpower, whatever the activity indicated
by the verb. Moreover, when Signora G says “.. . conducemmo in quei terribili mesi . . .
di vita primitiva. . ,” she explains her understanding of the essence or nature of
"‘^primitiva ” as a state of being rather than a state of affairs. One might well inquire as to
the nature of my evidence in support of this distinction, especially in view of her specific
mention of the absence of commodities. A literal reading of her sentences leads me to
infer that the absence of provisions, of a suflBcient supply of clothes, or wood is at least an
enormous inconvenience. I can go a step further to the inference that those things
identified as absent are symbolic of things Signor G treats as minimal measures or indices
of what she associates with the quality of life for a human being. This inference of
assessing or measuring conditions brings me to the point at which I begin to negotiate the
way Signora G constitutes her meaning. It seems to me that Signora G is taking stock of
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the way in which she and the others must engage the world—must live—in order to ensure
their survival. She makes sense of the presenting situation and circumstances as a
diminished state that does not meet Orsognese expectations. It is as if she infers that the
conditions of her survival and the survival of others somehow reverse their status as
“persons” to something she conceptualizes as a state of “origin.” Each verb used by
Signora G implies a state of consciousness, an awareness, that the activity signified by the
verb diminishes their essence or context as human beings. For example, her use of the
Italian verb conducemmo is particularly significant because it conveys a conscious bringing
about of a reduced state or change in being. When Signora G says, “. . . si mangiava erba
raccolta nei campi [we ate grass we gathered in the fields].. . ” she is commenting on a
behavior that is not only a necessary strategy for survival but also on how she perceived
and thus felt about that behavior. The Italian term primitiva denotes a previous state or
point of origin preceding “community,” or before civile life style. As Silverman points out
in her study of an Italian hilltown, the term civile is a core attribute used by Italians to
measure the comportment of themselves and others within a community(Silverman 1975).
The term relates to a presentation of self to a community of others. More importantly, the
term implies the proposition I discussed in an earlier chapter, that one is a person only in a
social community. I submit that the meaning of this segment of Signora G’s narrative
bears striking similarity not only to Dr. Silveri’s description of Orsogna in 1944, but also
to Signora B’s letter to her son in December 1943.
Recall that Signora B condemned the quality of life as a total
preoccupation with the necessities of living, a preoccupation with the material nature of
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everyday living. From these various clues, I propose that the meaning of this segment of
Signora G’s narrative is configured on the basis of several cultural premises which I re
state as follows:
(1) One’s essence as a person is measured by those processes and
activities that come about as a result of membership in a social community o f others-,
(2) Within such a community, the material components of survival are
perceived to be more a matter of social engagement with others and less as an activity in
and of itself;
(3) Thus, sociability and relatedness mark the boundary between civile and
primitiva,
(4) The absence of sociability and relatedness reduce one’s status to that
of a primitive being, here defined as one whose consciousness is focused on the material
aspects of survival.
In consideration of the first premise, it is interesting to note the sense of
ambiguity Signora G displays in identifying the group as a “social community.” Though it
is most evident that she denotes the group of ISO persons as a type of community within
which she identifies herself as a member, she is also clear that the nature of life lived now
is totally focused on the material, the bare, essential aspects of survival. Notice, for
example, the sharp division of labor by gender: women gathered and prayed while men
worked for the Germans. Signora does not tell us whether the labor is voluntary or
forced—part of a bargain enabling them to remain in the abandoned farmhouse. Signora
does, however, describe the presence of the German soldiers as a constant source of
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concern, of coercion and intimidation. All of these elements contribute to the pervasive
fear experienced by everyone present. Besides fear, notice also the constraints on activity
due to the constant bombardment and, indirectly, on the few pleasures that might alleviate
dread. At the time, with shelter provided under trees, in stables and other make-shift
means. Signora G and the others could not even conceive realistically of a future when
they could eventually return to Orsogna.
Signora G appears most irritated about not having a change of clothes or
spices to add flavor to the food. I submit that her mentioning of these seemingly
inconsequential factors, given the circumstances of the group, is indicative of a meaning
far more significant that the terms themselves convey. This refers to the second premise,
which is the sociability aspect of residing in a community. The life Signora G and the
others must endure, the conditions that in fact make their survival possible, are devoid of
cm/e—the sorts of interaction that had defined their life before the war. For instance,
preparing food and eating together is a social occasion in which the material significance
of providing sustenance to the body is obscured by the various cultural rules and gender
roles associated with being together as a family. It is notable that the division of labor by
gender in the farm house entails activities that segregate men and women in ways that
“normal” life does not. Highly significant is that Signora G identifies the primary activity
of women as saying the rosary; it is an activity that brings women together in their silence,
something that constrains interaction and restricts both the “public” and “private”
enactment of social roles so essential to women’s identity. References in Signora G’s
narrative make explicit certain activities of women—preparing the grass they ate, i.e..
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cooking. Implicit, one is aware, are attentions to children, to maintenance of some order
in the living space, to household chores. We know the women must have fulfilled these
classic social roles, although the primary activity of record in her account is related to their
spiritual role. Thus, however severe the exigencies of survival and their active demands,
we can assume they were met and women did their share.
The third premise relates to the first in that the qualities of sociability and
relatedness that defime a mode of engagement in the social world establish the minimum
requirement for living as a “social being.” And fi'om the way Signora G focuses on
contrasts in the terms she uses, I infer that she perceived herself and others as forced to
behave in ways she imagined life was lived before civile. While Dr. Silveri’s description of
life in “. .. caves, cellars, like troglodytes without aid, and without assistance ...” evokes
images of an earlier species, I believe his observation infers certain ontological standards
that to him address the dignity of being human. In agreement with Dr. Silveri, both
Signora B and Signora G lament the asocial consciousness associated with a life centered
on the acquisition of whatever they could obtain to meet basic needs.
At the time I interviewed the two women, I expressed my admiration for
what I viewed as their strength, their tenacity, and their will to survive. Recall the earlier
mention in this chapter of my interview with Signora C, wherein I expressed my feelings
of admiration and found her reluctance to acknowledge these qualities as her own
disconcerting. The narratives of these women have given me a far better understanding of
their disavowed responses. From their perspective, I was complimenting them for having
endured a life style they view as lacking dignity in that its essence and conditions
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diminished them in their own minds. Finally, besides the rupture and consequent dispersal
brought about as a result of evacuation, the indignity suffered, though necessitated by the
desire to survive, is perceived by the Orsognese to be the ultimate degradation they
suffered. Here, once again, it is the absence of the possibility of sociability and
relatedness, so essential to their self-perception, that made living a constrained activity.
Up to this point in my scrutiny of Signora G’s narrative, I have focused on
those aspects of the cultural matrix whose significance and relevance were to her attempts
to make sense of her experience. In the segment that follows, I identify certain elements
that distinguish this segment from the rest of the narrative. For example, apart fi'om her
mention that women prayed and men worked for the Germans, Signora G’s narrative
appears to be “gender neutral.” Also absent are specific references to or comments about
the others with whom she lived for six months. Indeed, some might make the observation
that if the social constructs of sociability and relatedness are as important as I claim them
to be, then one would expect to find more than a scant reference to other people. While I
address this point previously in my discussion of paesani, it is important to make clear that
Signora G does refer to others by her consistent reference to “we.” Sometimes, there is a
tendency to hear the first person plural as an aggregate that implies a consensus. Because
the‘T ’ of the speaking subject conveys authority and position, “we” is conventionally
assumed to have less authority and force. The point I wish to advance here is that Signora
G’s use of the first person plural does not silence others; rather, the use of “we” is a claim
of shared experience. Furthermore, elsewhere I observed that the conditions and
circumstances of the war made those categories by which the Orsognese draw distinctions
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among themselves less important than they had previously been. Bombs destroyed the
property of the capitalist and laborer alike. Landowners and day workers, business
owners and their employees were among the long column of people who were forced to
walk north or south to internment camps. Indeed, Orsognese claim that the fbllam ento in
Orsogna “made everyone the same.” While it is true that Signora G selects only one
incident about others to elaborate, I submit that this incident—Salvatore’s death—is
selected because it is a vivid memory of an occasion when the very norm of sociability and
relatedness is violated. This is not to say that Salvatore’s death was the only incident; it is
simply the incident she chose to tell me. Also, although there is meager mention of others
in Signora’s narrative, it does not mean this also applies to the other narratives collected
but not included in this chapter. A review of the narratives in the Appendix will show that
in this regard Signora G’s narrative is an exception. The fact that it is an exception is one
of the reasons I choose to use it in this chapter. I presumed that if my observation about
sociability and relatedness was indeed an important social construct, even the most
uncharacteristic narrative would reveal ewdence of the construct.
Notable as well is the observation that the Signora’s narrative contains only
two events to which she gives privileged status: the long column composed of hundreds
and hundreds ofpaesani walking north, away from Orsogna, and in the excerpt that
follows, the events subsequent to the death of Salvatore. By “privileged status,” I mean
an explicit marking of a recollection (in Signora G’s case, her remarks about the event
prefaced by the term Ricordo) that are endowed with explanatory force, as causes
explaining the flow of events.
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Since the issue of gender is dominant in the following segment, I think it is
beneficial to make some observations as a preface to the incident concerning Salvatore’s
death. Throughout most of her narrative. Signora G appears to characterize gender by
trying to create a sense of greater mutuality between the genders. With one notable
exception, she treats gender identity as less important than the more encompassing identity
of displaced Orsognese. If her account reveals a system of signification by which she
makes sense of the lived reality, and I think it does, then I infer that she stresses the things
that united women and men across the boundaries of gender and builds on that basis of
mutual interest. Two points come to mind that seem to warrant this inference; first, it is
generally agreed by anthropologists that how people feel in particular situations is not only
supposed to be “natural” given the situation, but it is also socially expected or even
socially required. At the very least, her silence on gender throughout most of the narrative
is significant. And there is more than enough emphasis placed on "We Orsognese” in the
narrative to make my observation about greater mutuality plausible. Second, not only do
all the narratives I collected evidence similar tendencies toward mutuality, but also the
families I observed displayed a high degree of collaboration and cooperation between
members, irrespective of age and gender. That is not to claim the absence of intense
conflict, which I also witnessed both between families and among family members.
Indeed, on those occasions I characterize as intense confi-ontations—for example, between
wife and husband—their dispute was based precisely on mutual claims about the absence of
collaboration and cooperation.
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1 suppose others might contend that because she is a woman. Signora G
was somehow constrained by the rules of cross-gender interaction to comment on male
behavior. Furthermore, if membership is as strong a component of identity as I claim it to
be, then it would follow that Signora G might deliberately have elected to be reticent,
since others might be offended by or even contest what she says.
I reject the former because she obviously does not feel constrained by
social conventions in revealing her assessment of Salvatore’s behavior, though she may be
constrained in the nature of her assessment. This is not meant as a dismissal of gender
considerations as an important factor in Orsognese social life. Rather, it is an indication of
my own inclination to work with what Signora G and all the other narrators appeared to
say or not say about gender. It is my opinion that gender studies in Italy have been
constructed to conform to theoretical positions that may not be regarded as appropriate to
actual lived gender relationships. Indeed, Pitkin’s study of the Tassoni family (1985),
which regards families as characterized by gender and generation roles constituted by
kinship, is invaluable because it repudiates the assumption that cross-gender and same-
gender relationships are mutually exclusive. With regard to the latter, it is an underlying
characteristic of all of the narratives I gathered that narrators mentioned other members of
the community and, in some cases (Signora G’s narrative is one example), the same event
was recalled by different individuals.
Turning now to the excerpt itself, I pause to examine the unstated cultural
rules and beliefs Signora G employs to endow the incident with specifically “moral”
meaning and how social relations play a central role in Signora G’s interpretation of
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significant personal and social events. The focus on haw things happened leads Signora G
to depend upon processes of inference that tie what she says to various cultural premises,
by which she explains how Salvatore’s death came about. The example is more complex
than one might surmise firom a first reading. In no other section of her narrative does
Signora G draw a clear line of demarcation between herself and the event she recollects.
She allows not only her subjectivity to emerge, but makes a judgment that may well not be
based on all of the facts—what was Salvatore’s real motive for leaving? The implicit
meanings need to be drawn out because her referents—rules, beliefs, assumptions, social
roles, statuses, and other social identities—are oblique. In other words, there seems to be
general content, assumed by Signora G to be evident to the listener, that is instantiated by
these events. Also, Signora G’s attending to the “how” rather than the “what” points to
the issue of actions taken by Salvatore; and thus, this focus on action makes her
explanation of how things came to be an evaluative commentary about agency.
Narrative, Signora G, Segment 3 Analysis
Anche noi una vittima nellapersom di Salvatore D ’Alieva, Cautillo. Un giomo, decise di andare a trovare un compagne stollato ad alcuni chilometri dalla nostra casa, nella visita il desiderio di poter trovare presso I 'amico qualche bottiglia di vino o un po' diolio, rassicuro la moglie dicendole, che, il mancato ritomo, la sera, avrebbe significato che I 'ospitante lo avrebbe trattenuto con se; stresse quitidi tranquilla. Trascorse la sera ed il giomo dopo e I 'altro ancora, quando alcuni dei nostri uomini che si erano allontanati di un centinaio di metri per bisogni corporalUnotarono lungo la strada, river so ai margini di essa, il corpo setiza vita del D 'Alieva, il quale era stato colpito da schegge di proiettoli di cannone quando si allontanava da casa. Ricordo la disperazione della moglie, la difficolta di dargli una onorata sepoltura: due tavole di legno, Jortwxatamente trovate, lo coprirono in una fossa scavata nei luogo.
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Translation
And we had a victim [of the bombardment] among us in the person of Salvatore D. One day he decided to go to visit a friend who had evacuated a few kilometers from our house [the farmhouse where the group took refrige], in the area of San Martino. Using as an excuse fo r his unusual visit the wish to find, at his fiiend’s house, some wine and some oil, he reassured his wife saying that if he had not returned that evening, it meant that he accepted the hospitality offered and remained there for the evening. He told his wife not to worry. The evening passed and the day after. The following day some of our men wandered oflf for about one hundred meters to relieve themselves. Along the side of the road, they noticed the lifeless body of Salvatore, who had been hit by shrapnel released by the exploding shells, when he left the house a few days ago. / remember his w ife's despair, the difficulty o f giving him a respectable burial: we foim d planks o f wood to cover him; we dug a hole and placed him there in the same place where had died.
The salience of these episodes is in the commentary Signora G provides to
explain how things happened. One discerns an almost inevitable “logic” in the terms she
uses to describe the death of Salvatore, the desperation experienced by his wife, and the
actions taken by the members of the group to provide an “acceptable” burial. I suggest
that there is something here more than the pragmatic description that getting on with the
story alone would require. That Signora G is critical of Salvatore’s behavior is apparent.
She implies that the rationale he offers for the risk entailed in visiting his fiiend (to obtain
a bottle of wine and some olive oil, presumably to share with the others) is a transparent
deception that does not justify, in her estimation, this “unusual visit.” Conflict is bound to
occur when families and neighbors live virtually in one another’s laps in a situation of
tension and uncertainty. Yet, it is striking that the events concerning Salvatore’s death are
the first glimpse of what I term “conflict.” Notice as well that although Signora G seems
to tell a linear, chronological story, the narrative is structured upon a series of
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constellating images, around which stories are formed. For example. Signora G says that
Salvatore “reassured his wife,” telling her that if he did not return by nightfall, it meant
that he “accepted the hospitality offered” and remained with his friend overnight. Here
Signora G describes what she takes to be instances of appropriate behavior taken by
Salvatore to diminish his wife’s concern, as well as the concern of others about the
wisdom of his proposed visit. Signora G appears to indicate the cultural ethos, the norms
culturally expected that a person feel a certain way and adopt a certain affective posture
and expressive style in relation to particular events. Abrahams remarks that “in the
process of stoiymaking. .. such matters might be mapped onto community structures of
sentiments and values” (Abrahams 1981, 2). Notice, for example, the Signora’s reference
to Salvatore’s mention of his expectation that his friend would offer “hospitality,” which
indicates a significant social relationship that entails rule-governed reciprocity. If an offer
of hospitality is refused, the refusal damages the fiiendship relation and is taken as a
personal insult by the fiiend.
Recall an earlier observation that the Orsognese sense of person is strongly
oriented to the surrounding sociality of their own group and the customary patterns of
behavior for their self-definition. This can be attributed to the value the sociocultural
system gives to the development of persons, rather than that of the individual or self.
Thus, in such a cultural matrix,there is little room for “excuses” and notions of expected
actions. Intentionallity or purposefulness is assumed to be characteristic of social
behavior. One likely inference to be drawn from Signora G’s description is that, at the
very least, Salvatore is incompetent, someone who, in Signora G’s estimation, acts on
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behalf of his own gratification rather than in consideration of his responsibilities toward his
wife and possibly the well-being of the others. Signora G’s criticism implies a failure on
the part of Salvatore to value and, thereby, enact certain “common-sense” behaviors that
she associates with social roles. Describing—even implying—behavior as actively causing
hardship, if not pain, characterizes that behavior as aggressive, intrusive in the life of the
social unit. It is to perceive that behavior as an attack on one’s confi’eres. Elsewhere, I
noted that the theme of membership—prominent in Signora G’s narrative-expresses a
social ideal in which the goals of the self and the community are in alignment. One aspect
of the Orsognese idea of conflict is that not only may individuals’ desires and actions come
into conflict with the norms of the community but the independent actions of the
individual per se are generally evaluated negatively. Here Signora G tends to read
Salvatore’s actions as symptoms that indicate or express a quality that bears evidence of
his relation to a rule and by extension his relationship to the system of rules of which he is
a part. Signora’s “telling about Salvatore” may be seen as her selection of evidence for an
appraisal of his “moral” character. I use the term moral in its philosophical sense, which
refers to the conscious awareness that one’s own behavior always affects others.
Signora’s account concerning Salvatore presents a social rather than a
psychological problematic; sociability is Signora G’s central concern. I offer two
observations to lend credence to my claim. First, Signora G’s account focuses on the
manner in which Salvatore, as husband, dealt with his wife. Less obvious but nonetheless
present a factor is Salvatore’s presence as a member of the community, “avemmo anche
noi una vittima [and we had a victim].” Signora G infers a diffuse concept of
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responsibility, combining the notion of why Salvatore acted as he did, how he could have
acted, and how he should have acted. Moreover, unstated, but linked to her mention of
his wife’s desperation, is the implication that his death removes the possibility of how in
the future heought to act. I submit that Signora G’s criticism is based on Salvatore’s
failure to fulfill her socially embedded expectations of how he should have acted given his
social identity as husband and as a member of the community. Such relationships entail
obligations which, in Signora G’s estimation, Salvatore disregarded. Abrogation of
responsibility toward another, already discussed elsewhere in conjunction with Signora
G’s narrative, appears to be the cultural basis for the Orsognese manner of judging others,
or what I gloss as criticism.
Second, in contrast to her depiction of Salvatore, Signora G stresses the
efforts of his wife and the others to ensure “wna onorata sepoltura [an honorable buriaj.”
And in so doing, the salience of family reputation and identity, so crucial in everyday
experience, was preserved. Not only did the community norms concerning appropriate
behavior toward the dead still guide Orsognese actions, but also these norms remained
unchanged in that they continued to prescribe obligations of kin and non-kin toward the
dead even in these extreme circumstances. Moreover, all of the narrators displayed an
orientation toward the social or situation referent rather than internal sensations, which I
submit is an expression of a positive self-image. In the course of interviewing each of the
narrators, I found they tended to describe their emotions in terms of the actions the
feelings generated. The context of these relationships, the sense of identity as embodied
social roles, and the cultural expectations between interactants had a strong effect on the
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intensity of feelings. The confidence with which they mediated emotions and strong
affective feelings seemed to be a function also of their core identity with Orsognese
culture. Narrators, however, tended not to describe the subjective quality of affective
experience. In the above segment, for example. Signora G says, “Ricordo la
dispersazione dell moglie [I remember his wife’s desperation]” and then goes on to
mention the diflBculties of providing an “honorable burial.” Here the dominant connotative
code is one of pointing out, in Signora G’s estimation, the needless problems Salvatore’s
rash act brought to others. In this context, rights, duties, and obligations due others are of
central importance, since it is here where beliefs associated with sociability and relatedness
become evident. While male cultural hegemony cannot be denied. Signora G’s account
infers community values and articulates unconscious and conscious critiques of Salvatore
as a member in that community. My reading of Signora G’s narrative has been concerned
with how she comprehended the displacement experience and how that understanding is
articulated in her narrative. Social structure in Orsogna, by which I mean the principles of
sociability, relatedness, and community that guide relationships among individuals and
groups of individuals, seems to be the primary avenue through which to address
Orsognese first-person narratives. In this regard, all narrators discussed in this chapter
have represented themselves not as appendages to men, but as creative and capable
individuals who are able to negotiate a vital role for themselves in the family and in the
society as a whole, even under the extreme conditions of their wartime experience.
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Conclusion
In framing this chapter, it was my intention, at the onset to demonstrate
that cultural ideas of sociability and relatedness organize the way in which Orsognese
women construed experience of World War II in their sector of the Italian front. However
severe the dislocation and privation they describe, implicit in their narratives is that which
the war did not destroy nor compromise: the individual’s embeddedness in the shared
values and substance of the Orsognese cultural matrix.
My analysis in the chapter devolves upon a sequence of elements that
unfold in the course of the three Orsognese narratives that represent what I see as a
natural progression in the way an unprecedented war experience not only revealed but
consolidated the meaning, for the authors, of being Orsognese. My purpose here is to
identify how each of the narrators connected their lived experience to its cultural
meanings. Certain key elements served as markers in the sense-making sequence that
emerged in the narratives and seemed to code them:
1. Identity is forged in the social experience of sharing existence with
others and in maintaining equilibrium between self and others. One’s basic identity resides
in a social community.
2. The meaning and coherence of a narrative are dependent on inference
and on unstated propositions that constitute cultural knowledge.
3. Not only does the impact of war mobilize, articulate, and re-organize
the meanings available to those caught up in its reality, but it shatters the “existential core
of being.”
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4. Notions of sociability and relatedness are central to the concept
Orsognese women have of themselves and others.
5. To be Orsognese implies cultural competence in meaning making and a
capacity to establish the self in the received social world. Goals of self and community are
in alignment.
6. Membership in a community represents a web of social bonds and
relationships. As a result of their dispersal, the Orsognese adhered to (an idea of) the
context in which they enacted the social roles that defined them. Their status as
“derelitti " dissolved accustomed class distinctions and allegiances.
7. The narrators and others with like experiences constituted an
interpretive community that shares the same cultural premises.
In the course of presenting the narratives, I have applied some principles
elucidated by the development of my analysis. Shweder’s axioms are a guide to unpacking
meaning in the narratives—to the discovery and utilization of what is left unstated as well
as what is explicit. Lakoff and Johnson’s concept of metaphor enables me to discern how
a narrator endows and encodes meaning through the use of figurative language, the
richness of which derives from applicability across different domains of experience.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as cultural competence created out of invisible structure
and values, extends my capacity to interpret the relationships and exchanges the
Orsognese employ to come to terms with social institutions and social practice.
Hallowell’s notion of a behavioral environment that, through a process of cultural
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interpretation provides context, led me to focus on how people make conscious
interpretations of their social experience.
I then proceed to observe the course the narratives take, using certain clues
that further develop their essential meaning and richness; locating the subjectivity encoded
in the narratives: voices are retrospective, creative, and interpretive; facts and events occur
in patterns that relate to their sociosymbolic content and reflect their subjectivity; the
narrator’s way of selecting and linking information that depends on inferences drawn from
unstated cultural propositions; the lived experiences that situated the narrators in a
community of others and the status of that community as a repository of shared symbols;
use of the “we” that does not silence others but draws them into the network.
I cite three claims I make that I believe bear directly on the extent to which
the Orsognese narratives elaborate in their unique idiom certain perspectives on human
interaction. First, notions of sociability and relatedness are central to the way Orsognese
women construe their reality. These are not abstract categories, but are integral to the
cultural matrix. Second, the meaning and the coherence o f what is said are dependent on
the process of inference and on unstated propositions constitutive of cultural knowledge.
Third, an individual’s behavior is context-dependent and strategic—the practical means
available to discern meanings and understand how concepts works. Experience and
expression of self-appraisal are not separate from the cultural scenarios out of which they
emerge.
Shweder’s indexicality and prior knowledge axioms are evoked to
elaborate the extent and power of what is unsaid, of what is “stored” in the meaning
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matrix of Orsognese culture—what is not explicit, but functions as a cognitive resource
and ontological source to the narrator recounting her unprecendented human experience.
What choices lay behind the efforts of the narrators at sense making? What seems
apparent to me is that the Orsognese women were able to rely on the basic social idiom
for their referents—for their moral and social sustenance—and that this dynamic served
them throughout their diaspora, continuing to do so into the present. A kinship tempered
in extremity was structurally intact, since it had its origin in the claims and standards that
represented the sense of what it meant to be Orsognese. But it is a sense in which
individual autonomy is nourished within the context of both a bounded and permeable self
—a self reinforced, not delineated, by the community of others. Thus, Bourdieu’s concept
of habitus is elucidated precisely in the consistency with which these women showed
sociability as constitutive of community. Very revealing is the extent to which the
subjectivity of the narrators, the metastatements and personal values that emerged in their
accounts, had the overall effect of instantiating and reinforcing the objective patterns of
sense-making in the community, whatever the locus of action or conditions being
described.
Each of the narrators, in the act of consolidating her membership in the
whole, established, in her text, her authority to relate what happened to the community.
To reiterate a point made about Signora G’s testimony, what the community experienced
on its dispersal, its primitive life in the farm house, its shared suffering along the German-
Allied front, gives her account the authority of a war narrative. Simultaneously, one sees
that the reference points for the humanity and survival of the Orsognese were the deeply
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embedded values and social meanings in which their identity and integrity as Orsognese
and human beings were grounded—whatever the context.
Each of the narrators addresses in a particular way the dissolution of
accustomed structures and context in their wartime habitat. But the ultimate measure of
their separation, of the ^ollam ento seems to be represented in their awareness of being
reduced to a state of primitivism. In this extremity, one notes the verb that expresses
active voice, denoting, as I comment, personal agency as the source of power. The sense
of belonging that informed Orsognese cohesion and tenacity does not obviate recognition
of agency—of the individual perceiving and acting as one entity within the group.
However, it is a show of autonomy that expresses and reinforces belonging to the social
unit, not—as in Salvatore’s case—taking a course regarded as errant. Does Salvatore’s
death then become a metaphor for the failure to honor the substance of the civilel Each
of the three cultural premises or claims I apply to my discussion elaborates on sociability,
relatedness, and community as factors that mediate the civile life. Grounded in this
matrix, the Orsognese might have lived “as primitives” for six or seven months, but what
is of overriding important to them is that they did not “become primitive.”
Stripped essentially of the material context that had been basic to them, life
itself—which meant being Orsognese—was what was left to them, each action, or response
to their condition, each narrative account reaffirmed their Orsognese values. In all of the
narratives, the feelings and sensibilities that flag emotional response were as alive, original,
and disciplined as each narrator’s presence in the moment or incident described. In the
utter simplicity of a fact or simile, the “listener” is struck with the full impact of sadness.
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loss, love, fear: Signora B’s reference to the sorrel plants the sheep have eaten, the “sweet
life” of her pigeons; Signora A describing the group watching their houses torched; the
focus of fear that punctuated the blunt, linear narrative of Signora G. It seems to me that
emotional context, social identity, and cultural expectation were all factors in the intensity
with which the narrators expressed their affective relations.
These narratives make us participate provisionally in the disorder,
dislocation, and privation experienced by the narrators in war. It seems to me, that in so
doing, they make three significant contributions to our understanding of a community
whose cultural fabric remained intact during extreme wartime conditions in one Italian
sector:
1. The narratives demonstrate the potential of providing a rich source of
data about inter-communal relations and other community-mediated dimensions of social
experience.
2. They reveal, as texts, how the narrators connected their lived
experiences to the established cultural meanings of those experiences. Regular patterns of
behavior occur as a result of practices generated in social interaction.
3. What was said depends for its full meaning and interpretive power on
what was unsaid—on beliefs, values, premises encoded in the cultural matrix of the
community.
The voices of the three women presented in this chapter, expressing their
ambiguity and dissent (in response to the war), are clearly “heard.” They are not
smoothed out, under-represented, or otherwise silenced as is the case in traditional
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historical accounts of the war. As implicated in war as the men during the siege of
Orsogna, they have authority to provide their standpoint on their experience as a valid and
valuable segment o f the record.
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THE ORSOGNESE SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE AS AN INTEGRAL ELEMENT IN CONSTRUCTING A HISTORY
.. .The world gains shape and meaning through the language which represents it, and that language, unique to every concrete instance or individual, is in turn constituted out of various social typifying “languages” which are themselves the product of prior socially significant verbal performances.
Bakhtin 1981 The Dialogic Imagination
Introduction
The principal aim of my research is to attempt to understand and analyze in
the present and for the future that which women, as social actors involved in history, have
held as significant in the past and to show how they have perceived and interpreted this
within their cultural matrix. As Bakhtin and others point out, every utterance is the
product of interaction between speakers and the broader context of the total social matrix
in which the utterance emerges (Bakhtin 1981, 293). My research demonstrates not only
that women’s narratives convey information about facts and events, but also that these
facts and events are inscribed in patterns that are related to their cultural context and that
reflect, through complex processes, women’s subjectivity. By subjectivity, I mean the
simultaneous conscious and unconscious depictions of one’s self that I take to be a viable
means through which to interpret that experience originating at an individual sense or
cognitive source.
167
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Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Central to my treatment of narrator self-representation is the claim that the
experiential self is not unitary, nor fixed, nor coherent. Rather, self-representation through
the aid of narrative analysis reveals an alternative view of the self that is located
historically in language, produced and reproduced in everyday—albeit extreme—gendered
and cultural experiences. I believe that this factor is often overlooked because what is
experienced is always experienced by an engendered “self.” Narrators’ subjectivity is
lodged within facts and events woven into a tapestry they regard as a reality, which is
fundamentally intersubjective. By giving primacy to the fnndcanetUal intersubjective
groundings o f social life, I attempt to illuminate the active and negotiable processes of
social life.
By intersubjectivity, I mean the products—thoughts, emotions and beliefs,
and practices—of one’s participation in social-cultural discourses and in institutions that
endow the unfolding events of everyday life with meaning. Thus, the cultural formation of
intersubjectivity is more an on-going construction and less a fixed point of departure or
arrival from which one interacts with others. Intersubjectivity is an affect of that
interaction. This would explain why Orsognese women construed their experience of war
—one that clearly stands outside any previous definition of their “reality” as inscribed by
social norms and practices-in the way they did.
As a concept discussed within this chapter, the cultural formation of
subjectivity refers to the process of configuring the perceptions of individuals as loci of
sense-making and initiators of action, endowing persons with the capacity for agency that
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is positioned, motivated, and constrained by social networks whose significance is
culturally coded. Through experience—that process by which, for all social beings,
subjectivity is constructed—one places oneself, or is placed in, social reality and so
perceives and comprehends as “natural” those relations, material, economic, and
interpersonal, that are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical. Here, I think it
is important to make a distinction between the concepts of subjectivity as defined above
and subject position, since I do not use these as interchangeable concepts. By subject
position, I mean social-cultural categories such as class, gender, kinship roles, and so on,
which social actors can accept, or redefine, or resist. As components of the cultural
matrix, they are unstable categories; nevertheless, they profoundly influence subjectivity
due to the importance of language, particularly in its labeling or defining characteristics,
and to social interactions, the field in which subjectivity is produced and reproduced.
My treatment of the narratives in the previous chapters stems from the
rejection of an understanding of subjectivity as unchangeable or unitary in favor of an
interpretation of subjectivity as always in the process of being produced, as non-unitary, as
proposed by Flax and others (Flax 1987; Smith 1987; Smith 1990). It is also in accord
with Harding’s assertion that a fundamental contribution of feminist methodology is that it
presents a comprehensive view of the questions women have about their own lives
(Harding 1987 and 1991).
During the mid-eighties, as anthropologists became more attuned to
“blurred genres” and as other scholars attempted to distance themselves fi’om the norms of
“scientific” qualitative research, the concept of subjectivity attained a nuanced connotation
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that was based on the thoughts—conscious and unconscious—and emotions of the
individual, her sense of herself in the world, a way of understanding her or his relation to
the world (Geertz 1983). However, subjectivity as an analytical concept remained in
opposition to objectivity, contributing to the continued objectification of the subjective
experience and the continued pretense of distancing the knower fi-om the known. Hence,
subjectivity—as I use the concept—refers not to a unique, fixed, and coherent self but a
“self’ that is always in the process of being and becoming, a “self’ that is socially
produced and engendered primarily through the critical interface of language, social
interactions, and experiences in a process of production and transformation that is pivotal
in the formation of subjectivity. Rejecting the notion of subjectivity as unitary and
proposing that it is in continual transformation and fragmentation also implies rejection of
the assumptions about human identity that lead us to believe in anecessary unified self. I
take this perspective on the concept of subjectivity because I believe it enables a move
toward a better, more enlightened view of the complexities of human identity. For
example, a recurring pattern that links the narratives I present is the strong, almost visceral
reaction Orsognese women felt to dis-order and how quickly they moved to create order
in situations that were chaotic. By drawing on categories consistent with “subject
position,” Orsognese women are in accord with Heilbrun’s (1988) assertion that for
women’s subjectivities to be fully narrated, they must speak of the vast experiences they
have and the significance of these experiences to them as women and with Du Plessis’
(1985) advice that women’s narratives make the conflicts that emerge from the subject
position central to their stories. Both Du Plessis and Heilbrun emphasize that women’s
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narratives must go “beyond the ending” (Du Plessis 1985, 4) in that women, in
constructing their narratives, reject the regulating categories of subject position—the
patriarchal definitions of being female. As an anthropologist, I attend to women’s
depictions of what it means—experientially—to be female within a social universe
embedded in specific cultures. I neither deny the existence of repressive patriarchy nor
reject the marginal status accorded to women. Rather, 1 mean to draw attention to the
complex relationship between identity and social categories, to show that in particular
those categories women carry as a result of social relationships—mother, wife, sister,
daughter, and so on—co-exist with other structural categories equally definitive of and
equally important to subjectivity. To assume that going beyond the ending—reflecting on
conflicts women face living under patriarchy as the one true test of women’s authentic
self-representation—limits our understanding of what it means to be a woman within a
cultural matrix. In the first place, using the criteria of Heilbrun and Du Plessis pre-defines
what ought to be revealed fi-om within the narrative: the narrator’s depiction of herself in
the world as she understands it and as she challenges the definitions she resists. Second,
both criteria assume that narratives that do not make these conflicts central—resisting or
challenging subject-position categories—reproduce the master narratives of patriarchy.
The major fault I find here is the essentialism that implies that the “master narrative” is
solely and uniquely patriarchal. The lesson of this research has an importance, I believe,
that is also resonant in contemporary cross-cultural research on gender: the subject
position of any social actor emanates fi-om within a complex tapestry whose pattern is
more than the sum of the threads of which it is composed. While these criteria point to
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what “ought to be said,” they are silent on how it will be said. Therein lies the challenge;
to hear how a cultural matrix shapes the expression of dissonance, to listen to women as
they express their internal experience, as they come to understand how it is for them to be
women in this context at this time (Bimbaum, 1994). Italian Feminist Adriana Cavarero
expressed these same sentiments when she observed that “the female subject does not
emerge from history simply because one investigates her existence, almost driving her out
of silent crevices where she has kept herself safe, far from the world of the other. Rather,
the female subject can emerge when she decides to be her own subject, to think about her
subject taking herself as her starting point, here and now” (Cavarero 1991, 185). With
each narrative, Orsognese women take themselves as their subject and think about that
subject as they experienced times and conditions they did not create. I find myself in
agreement with Alessandra Bocchetti, who claims “that true silence takes place when
something is silenced, when we are not included in discourse and so it is impossible for
any one to hear us, when there are no words to say it with” (Bocchetti 1991, 152). In so
far as this research concerns the experience of Orsognese women during World War II,
the narratives break a silence, as Bocchetti points out, that even the “most anonymous
mute man” was not subjected to, “. . . because the values which informed his actions and
his thoughts were recognized by a discourse which included him, even if it went beyond
him.”
The Contributions of My Practice to Data-Rich Results
One important potential this work is that anthropologists interested in
meaning and subjectivity may legitimately look outside the private interior of individuals to
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the processes of social interaction—to individuals’ actions and reactions within a cultural
context. Women’s narratives as cultural artifacts comprise an extraordinarily sensitive
register of the complex relationships that obtain between the cultural matrix and the
consciousness of social actors. My focus on women’s experience goes beyond a
compensatory enterprise to a commitment for an enhanced understanding of the various
cultural factors constitutive of sense making. The rich texts of the narratives presented
here allow us to hear, see, and feel the past. They take us through to the other side of the
looking glass: from this point of view they are irreplaceable.
The relationship between culture and subjectivity provides an alternative
approach to issues concerning gender previously addressed in terms of private and public
domains. The notion of public and private spheres or domains is a social science concept
originally used to describe and explain phenomena drawn from the experience of emerging
industrial societies. Recently, the concept of public and private spheres has been criticized
for its failure to address women and men as engendered social beings (Albera 1988). In
the anthropological literature, particularly that pertaining to the circum-Mediterranean, the
notion of public and private spheres has been used to universalize a particular pattern of
experience that reduces the dynamic, interpersonal, and culturally shaped process of
engendering to a type of essentialism (Nelson 1974). That is to say, the application of the
concept of public and private domains to an understanding of gender roles and status, in
my estimation, fails to address the complex relationship between gender and identity, the
range of attributes subsumed within one’s identity as man or as a woman. Those insights
that are provided tend to foster stereotypes and, perhaps most importantly, draw attention
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away from inquiries about how cultural processes—such as socialization—influence the
formation of subjectivity in the engendered person, and how subjectivity is formed and
reformed, enabling men and women to perform as sentient agents in an apparently
meaningful world.
Applied primarily to explain the asymmetrical power relations between
women and men, the concept of private and public spheres creates the illusion that social
power, particularly in the circum-Mediterranean, is embedded in gender: males act based
on the shared social assumption that they are powerful social actors, whereas women
become powerful as a by-product of associations between gender and social domains and
between gender and social roles that restrict their exercise of power to these roles and
within these domains. My ethnographic research indicates otherwise. On the basis of my
data, 1 draw the conclusion that men and women, as social agents, are embedded in
dynamic and shifting relations of power in daily interaction. It seems to me that power is
evoked through these interactions within multidimensional contexts. Power is constituted
from multiple directions simultaneously, shaped by cultural assumptions about what is
considered “natural” to individuals relative to their gender and about what sorts of power
one can legitimately exercise, given the wide range of social “selves” that, combined,
comprise what is conventionally referred to as “the individual.” Power is not simply the
impetus to dominate. Rather, it is creative, coercive, and co-extensive with meaning so
that even those who “have power” are themselves dominated. To understand the exercise
of power as a component of social identity and gender, one needs to pay attention to the
shifting contexts, the assortment of social “selves” evoked in interpersonal relationships.
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and the myriad contexts in which cultural assumptions shift the way power is defined.
Women’s place—and, for that matter, men’s place as well—is not a separate domain or
sphere of existence but is defined in terms of gender and configured with meaning within
the broad social community to which women and men belong. Social agents and social
structure are interdependent and, thus, intrinsically social and historical. Fieldwork
provided the experiential context in which I could explore the theoretical proposition I
found intellectually persuasive; social systems are produced and reproduced in the
interactive social practice of individuals and groups. Social structures enable, as well as
constrain, individual agency. The possibilities and patterns for action are always socially
and historically situated, always limited and limiting.
The Evolution of a Research Style that Produces the Desired Ends
My first concern in conducting my research was to attend to the way
cultural premises are actively used by the women I interviewed to draw inferences that go
beyond the factual data of events to create and evoke social meaning. A central premise,
definitive of the Boasian tradition and most notable in the work of Edward Sapir, is that
“experience narrated is embedded in the conventions of a culture as [these conventions]
are lived out in its social system” (Sapir 1958,124). In recounting their experience, the
women I interviewed revealed the problematic of their social reality. In one sense,
women’s account of their war-time experiences reflected the shared experience of
women’s lives at a specific point in time, under conditions beyond their control. More
importantly, their accounts also reveal the way women at times accepted and resisted the
cultural ideology that surrounds and encodes their actions. The narratives are indeed a
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cultural artifact, for they show us a multidimensional map of the social order that is taken
for granted—what is given and expected in social relationships—as well as the density and
intensity of experiences and practices within that social order.
A second aspect of my research that addresses concerns stemming from
previous studies in Italy is the nature of community. Earlier studies in Italy, particularly
those conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, emphasized the physicality of community, its
inward orientation and closed borders, which often led to reification of the notion of
community. More recent work there and elsewhere in the circum-Mediterranean
acknowledges that the way in which the notion of community is delineated by
ethnographers varies according to the specific analytical interest being pursued at any
given point. Social agents, be they ethnographers or members of the community, construe
meaning not monolithically but rather as a shifting complex of factors, including their
interrelationships—the residual and the emergent, dominant and alternative values,
meanings and practices—that act to create potential spaces from which meanings can be
contested and against which meanings must be continuously redefined and re-defended. It
is not the nature of our practice to assume that concepts such as “community,” once
defined and described, need no further examination. Nor should it be assumed that a re
examination of what heretofore was taken as a given is a criticism of past research.
Rather, reconsidering assumptions, especially those we use to classify and represent “the
other,” is perhaps the most engaging aspect of our practice; it broadens our inquiry
beyond what we think we already know and it requires that practitioners pause and re
examine analytical constructs.
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A third contribution of this research is that it points to the need to rethink
the human experience of warfare in terms other than those conventional stereotypes—e.g.,
the “battle piece” so prominent in military history—that is so familiar to us. There is much
to be learned by examining the view presented by those who live within war and the
authorized version of it, as exemplified by the post-Vietnam literature as well as the
contemporary personal accounts of the siege of Sarajevo and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia
(Filipovic 1994; Maas 1996). Ethnographic texts empower voices not usually heard in
authorized discussion of the “historic,” those whose voices are muted when they are
included within broad descriptive categories such as “civilians” and “refugees.” Besides
empowerment, ethnographic accounts provide more than simple testimony, for they draw
our attention to what has been accepted as the “truth” of war as a consequence of the
legitimacy accorded to a type of history. Narratives of Orsognese women bring to light
things that had been forgotten, indeed that never have been addressed in the official record
and that, worse, are generally considered too “subjective” to be factual. Taking seriously
women’s accounts of their experiences places in question official interpretations of past
and present. We need “local knowledge” to begin to address the question. What is history
and who makes it? Otherwise, as Rabinow warns, we may inadvertently endorse
hegemony by crediting it with too much success (Rabinow 1986, 299). Thus, this effort is
relevant to those concerned with the disputed ownership of history. In recent years,
various scholars have begun to treat history as a negotiable good rather than an objective
entity. The study of European constructions of history in situ offers an exceptional
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opportunity to examine what has been meant by both “Europe” and “history” and calls out
for ethnographic investigation (Herzfeld 1987).
Orsognese narratives, as data, display unique qualities for the
anthropological use of personal documents. Such documents reflect, on the one hand, the
“textuality of history,” the view that history is knowable only as mediated through a wide
range of discursive practices and, on the other, the “historicity of texts,” the view that all
discourse is culturally specific and ideologically meaningful (Montrose 1988). Working
with history requires an awareness that history is always the history of individuals and that
the way in which the past is being conceptualized is embedded in culture. Consequently,
the myth of canonical history-history as simply an explication of cause and effect—
becomes a subject for study.
Interpretative Analysis
In this section, my objectives are to discuss practices I employed in my
reading of the narratives and to provide a compatible relationship between the data and my
interpretation of the data. Although I emphasize certain aspects of my analytical method,
1 do not wish to imply either that there is anything uniquely privileged about narrative
analysis or that my methods are unique in the practice of ethnographic research. What I
do think is unique is presenting a discussion not often included in ethnography: the
preservation of the form of the qualitative data as a means to guide interpretive analysis.
Any retrospective view of ethnographic research forces an immediate
reflection on the processes of that research. Inevitably, ethnographers (and others) must
raise several questions, all of which concern issues of congruency. One aspect of
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congruency, particularly in data analysis, is intuitive; and, intuition—often treated as
something mysterious, unverifiable, and at best opinion—is rarely discussed in
ethnographic studies, although it is generally discussed by ethnographers in informal
collegial settings. While my delineation of these practices may be considered as a type of
“method,” I want to stress that they are neither mechanical in nature nor in application.
My approach to narrative analysis was, in many respects, a continuation of the practices I
followed during my fieldwork. My experiences during fieldwork (the most illuminating
were elaborated in previous chapters) became a critical component of my approach to data
analysis, since any interpretation that is to enhance understanding must be based on a clear
conception of what is to be interpreted.
As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 ,1 recognize that in order for me to
provide a comprehensive analysis of the narratives, it was important to show the links
between the meanings encoded in the narrative and the way these meanings operated in
everyday life. Perhaps it is best to conceptualize my approach to data analysis as a
continuous movement between the cultural premises entailed in the narratives and the
manifestation of these premises in the ethnographic present.
Earlier, I mentioned that it was my practice to review the interview tapes,
my notes, and the written narratives on a daily basis during my stay in Orsogna. Besides
being a productive way to prepare for follow-up interviews, this daily review of the texts I
had gathered stimulated hypotheticals that I could test, primarily in formal and informal
conversations, with the women with whom trust levels were fully established. Regina’s
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comment regarding what it means to be Orsognese, discussed in Chapter 4, is one of
several examples I have included from follow-up interviews.
Interpretative Anaivsis and Fieldwork
References to episodes in fieldwork in Chapters 2 and 3 draw attention to
an aspect of research not often mentioned in traditional methodological texts, participatory
presence, by which I mean the degree to which a researcher genuinely embraces the
ethnographic context rather than standing apart from it as an observer, judge, or critic
(Bateson 1994). Presence is expressed through the mobilization of one’s sensibilities to
the situation and to the other person(s) in it, bringing into action one’s capacity for
response. In Chapter 2 ,1 made a distinction between the entry phase of fieldwork and the
beginning of ethnographic inquiry, which I termed engagement. Presence is a quality that
I associate with the latter. It seems to me that initially I was preoccupied with “the
agenda” of dissertation research in all of its various dimensions. During this phase, I was
not only in “elsewhere,” but my concerns were “elsewhere.” Upon reflection, I find that I
marked the transition from entry to engagement when I noticed that my attention shifted
from my anthropologist self-image to my experiential self. Image-centered communication
tends to be self-conscious but not self-disclosing. In the former, the researcher’s
participation tends toward correctness and, consequently, ethnographers gain few insights
about their own preconceptions.
The sense of presence I was able to cultivate during fieldwork exemplified
the stance I modeled when beginning my analysis. To situate myself, I would review my
notes and other material specific to the interview. My journal entries were invaluable
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because they provided a record of my impressions, my sense of the texture of the
interview, and the nature of the ambiance I had experienced. These entries also contain a
great deal of description about other factors, including the room decoration, the smells of
food cooking, and so on. I immersed myself in the record of the interviews as a way of re
creating a sense of what it was like to be there at the time of the interview.
The term “data” often carries the implication of concrete, independent
objective fact. Because of this conceptualization, the term data bears a connotation that
privileges the objective over the subjective. Consequently, there is a tendency to
conceptualize interviews less as an occasion for discovery and more as a “mining
operation.” As both Michelle Rosaldo and Renata Rosaldo (among many others) have
observed, data does not consist only of the information obtained; it also includes how the
information adheres within a larger configuration of meaning systems invoked by both the
interviewer and interviewee (M. Rosaldo 1980; R. Rosaldo 1989). The bits of meaning
we collect and call data pose formidable problems of interpretation.
Competent interpretation of data gathered during fieldwork depends in
large measure on the cultural competency one gains as a result of participatory research
(Denzin 1989). In Chapters 2 and Chapter 3 ,1 include selections of journal entries and
episodes that occurred during fieldwork, hoping to convey a fluid sense of what I was
working with to avoid the distance implied in the phrase working on. I preferred to
discuss my notes and materials without sacrificing my connection to the notes; that is,
without forgetting that I was the one who took the notes, asked the questions in the
interview, responded to narrator questions, and selected those aspects of encounters.
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interviews, and written narratives that were significant for my purposes. Moreover, it
seemed to me essential that I preserve the contextual form of the data as a rich resource
and a helpful guide in narrative analysis, particularly when data were communicated in
settings of naturally occurring social interaction.
Making Sense of Meaning Making
Two other developments during my fieldwork experience must be noted
here since they are crucial elements in my analytical approach. First, in early phases of my
research (see Chapter 2), I recognized that I went about my work with certain
preconceptions that affected how I perceived what was said and how I selected “data.” It
was a recognition that I could not act as a value-free researcher who can gain knowledge
unfiltered through culturally shaped categories nor that the “data” collected could in any
way be independent of the person collecting it. Second, in recognizing the former, it
seemed to me that my next step was to achieve an understanding of how and why the
experiences within the narratives, oral and written, fit together within a system of meaning
that made sense to the Orsognese women I interviewed. In this regard, I find both
wisdom and comfort in Bateson’s remark that participant observation is more than a
research methodology; it is a way of being, “a kind of on-going improvisation” (Bateson
1992). To conceptualize field work as a matter of data gathering is not the sort of
practice Bateson encourages.
Fieldwork permitted me to enter the narratives with what Bateson terms
“peripheral vision.” Interpretation always starts in, and is an articulation of, the
interpreter’s everyday, common-sense understanding of what is going on. A significant
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part of my practice was my later review of, and attempt to integrate, the material and
dynamics of the interviews at the end of the day. These sessions comprised a critical
phase of my data processing. First, I became attuned to the way the Orsognese selected,
ordered, and organized information. I have included excerpts of field journal entries as
examples of the effort I made to gain insights that would illuminate the perspectives of
Orsognese women. In attempting to grasp the significance of ordinary events, I attempted
to glean a perspective akin to that of the social agents implicated. My account of Rosa
and Rocco’s relationship in Chapter 3 is one illustration that comes to mind. It was
essential at this stage that I recognize that my mystification in these instances derived from
my own cultural values and cultural orientation, and that I learn to suspend them in my
effort to pursue Orsognese meanings. As a consequence, I developed a capacity for
metaconsciouness, or meta-analysis, which facilitated my access to Orsognese
interpretation of events and behavior as well as language. Some of the instances of great
tension—and, when the issues were resolved, most crucial insights—resulted from this
exploration of social dissonance that I experienced in regard to the differences manifested
in Italian kin relationships. I wish to point out that everything said about my approach to
analysis is based on the use of Italian language text. This process begins in Chapter 3 with
my description of the terms umanita and sofferenza. In my analysis in Chapter 4, the
application of this approach to several terms proves to be crucial to deriving precisely
those cultural codes I sought in Orsognese behavior and narratives.
Second, as a result of my daily review of interview tapes and notes, 1
discovered that understanding was not merely a matter of better questions or improved
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techniques. Rather, it consisted of the willingness to listen to the “other,” to permit
individuals to reflect on their own experience and choose for themselves which
experiences and feelings were central to their sense of their past. I focused my efforts on
grasping what particular behaviors meant to the narrator and, respectively, on
understanding how that behavior affected her consciousness and activity. This endeavor
revealed certain patterns that typify the loci of attention characteristic of all narrators;
naming, describing, and valuing. It is not my intention to represent these either as
analytical categories or as cultural schema. Rather, I consider them guideposts that
provide entry into the meaning making realm of the narratives.
Third, I began interpretative analysis by giving the narratives three separate
readings. As I read and re-read the narratives, I made marginal notes: in this preliminary
scan, I was most concerned with identifying clusters of data that had significance, cued in
the oral narratives by tone and emphatic forms of speech, and in the written narratives,
manifested by immediate and lengthly explanation and/or description. I proceeded in a
more or less theoretically uninhibited manner, guided primarily by sense-making practices
I observed in social interactions among the Orsognese. It seemed to me that by applying
what I had come to know about Orsognese sense-making, certain patterns would emerge.
Working out these patterns involved what I call intuition, in the sense that I could
anticipate what would follow in the narrative and why what was being discussed was
significant, as in the conversation with Laura during which I misread her silence.
Establishing patterns does not imply the absence of anomalies; for example, the tension
involving Regina’s determination that I not cross the Piazza with dirty clothes in hand. At
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times a passage seemed important, but I could neither attach a marginal label to it nor
identify why it was significant. I highlighted it anyway.
Fourth, my next block of readings was more topic-oriented as I kept my
subject—the meanings women associate with their wartime experiences—in focus. I sought
to summarize the accounts I had been given by creating profiles of each narrator’s
account. As I read, I made several types of marginal comments on the text. I summarized
and labeled the events that defined the general plot of an individual’s account, noted
aspects of the account I found salient relative to the types of experience inscribed, the
emotions expressed, and so on. I highlighted the passages that the narrator, or others
present during the interview, seemed to find especially significant, evidenced either by
lengthy elaboration or by offering corrections to or clarifications of what the narrator had
said. I also highlighted and annotated passages that seemed to express especially well the
interviewee’s state of mind or mood at the time. None of this was done with the distinct
intent to code the transcripts into fi-agments of data, but rather to discern the contours and
characteristics of one individual’s experiences.
Once I felt thoroughly familiar with a narrator’s account, I made analytical
notations summarizing the account’s significance to the narrator. All sorts of questions
arose: Could I provide a basis for each interpretation offered that drew upon some
instance observed in participatory research? Why did I select certain narratives and not
others? Are there significant anomalies that ought to be discussed? Geertz’s observation
on the interpretative enterprise proved to be a beacon of light: “It is a strange science
whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere
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with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that
you are not quite getting it right” (Geertz 1973).
At this juncture, I was particularly concerned with the identification of
those bits of information or implications thereof that are accepted as “natural.” I applied
what I had learned in the field; that the social order is made manifest, emerging out of
social interaction. Social organization is the outcome of this intentional action as people
collectively and individually try to work out day-to-day solutions to problems they
encounter in concrete situations.
I defined interpretation as an opening up, a laying out, and an articulation
of the perspective from which an event or interaction has been understood. There seemed
to be two sorts of preparation for interpretation: choosing the “right entry,” and working
out a genuine way of accessing it. Choosing the entry point is the first task in establishing
the starting point for an interpretive inquiry. I used the evacuation—as my
departure point because the narrators themselves began their narratives using it as their
departure point. Intuitively, it felt right to follow the direction set by the narrators.
However, I was aware that I could not be sure at the outset that I had found the best
access point, as the text of access becomes clear only as interpretation is worked out. I
attended to those portions of the narrative that conveyed information about a set of
patterns that emerged from my field notes. These patterns revealed three aspects of
meaning: meaning (1) as a mode of engagement; (2) as a source of influence on others;
and, (3) as a configuration of variables, including gender, age, emotions, and so on.
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As I re-read the narratives, I wanted to avoid making the error of becoming
overly involved with the content of what had been said and consequently missing the core
of what was going on. I use the word “error” here because it seemed to me that the more
I became immersed in what was said, the more my own cultural inferences came into play.
In effect, I could not retain the sense-making perspective of the narrator if I “translated”
the narrative so that it made sense to me. To sustain the balance I sought, I devised a
reading strategy I call topical paralleling frames. I marked the text according to an
arbitrary range of four possible frames indicative of the position taken by the narrator: ( 1 )
staying with the topic; (2) developing the topic to the next “logical” step; (3) diverging
from the preceding text, although not totally abandoning it; and, (4) explicitly changing the
subject. Again, it would be a mistake to view these frames as mechanical. In applying
them, my goal was not to be “right.” Rather, I wanted to extract the narrator’s
perspective beyond what was stated so that what emerged was implicitly embedded in the
passage. This involves working with the unknown as if it is known. As always, the
unknown is an uncomfortable place to be, an exciting place to work, and a continually
unsettling place to inhabit subjectively. Returning to narrative content, I sought to
contravene my own sense-making processes with recognition of Orsognese social
processes that underlay what was presented in the text. For example, I may have been
inclined to read Signora’s B preoccupation with her pigeons as an indication of despair
rather than hope had I not recognized that for the Orsognese all forms of sociability
involving others—including animals—is life-affirming. I use the term “paralleling” in the
sense of a scale, referring to how much or how little one narrator phrased the content of
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what she said in the same general way as other narrators. I found this reading strategy
helpful because it increased my awareness of subtle shifts, as well as stable patterns, in
what narrators revealed about what they thought was going on. Also, this mode of text
engagement facilitated my interpretation because it made subtitles apparent and implied
meanings that required further attention. In summation, paralleling kept my own sense-
making capacities in low profile while preserving the narrator’s authorship as an involved
and culturally immersed person. Topical paralleling is like a steering wheel in that neither
the steering wheel nor the topic is the source of energy that will take us where we want to
go; both require other agents.
While subject matter is never unimportant, it is by no means the sole aspect
of significance. I “read” the subject matter as a “site” of significance that provided
avenues for appreciating other more implicit aspects of narrator subjectivity—another point
in the interpretive process at which my notes and the ancillary material gathered during
fieldwork were very helpful. It is not sufficient to know only the topics dealt with. It
seems to me that the variety of resources I accumulated through the aforementioned
practices helped me not only to identify what was significant but also to clarify the
implications of what remained unstated.
The on-site interviews made me more fully attuned to the multidimensional
potential of the meanings to be “unpacked.” Sorting through my notes and reviewing
interview tapes heightened my awareness of nuances in the ways a narrator expressed
affect when recounting her experience. I looked for clues, textual and vocal, that signaled
affect—for example. Signora G’s account of Salvatore’s death—to discern what really
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mattered and for clues about how narrators experienced themselves in the incidents they
recalled.
How narrators framed their accounts of incidents and episodes often
entailed elaborate and detailed description, which served as another meaningful clue
during the course of my analysis. These narrator framing devices—what I call clues—
provided a type of zoom lens with which I could monitor the modulation of utterances as
they flowed from specificity to generality. After completing each portrait, I began to
amplify my initial level of understanding by bringing together details and patterns gleaned
from other narratives. Indeed, information understood at only one level of generality or
specificity is potentially information misunderstood. Distancing myself from the data as
fragments of meaning, I was able to pose questions that emphasized the social and cultural
context; Why is the narrator choosing this particular mode of self-representation? What
is the narrator’s underlying concern as she speaks here in this excerpt and in the others she
recollects? Who are the persons, the incidents this narrator is describing? What is left
unstated in this narrative? What draws the narrator’s attention as she recollects, and why?
Finally, none of the above discussion regarding interpretative analysis that I
have presented should be considered a recipe or formula for the “best” approach to
narrative analysis. Quite the contrary. I have attempted to show .how narratives enhance
the possibilities for a variety of analytical strategies. One way my approach proved to be
most useful is that it enabled me to move beyond the data to the ways in which the
narratives are socially and culturally constructed.
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Orsognese Women as Social Actors in History
During the course of my analysis in Chapter 4 ,1 made a series of four
claims that basically define the codes, the framework, the context according to which
Orsognese women define their social reality. These claims form what I consider to be the
core elements by which Orsognese women structure their social world and engage in
social life. First, cultural ideas of sociability and relatednessorganized the way Orsognese
women construed their experience during World War II. Second, notions of sociability
and relatedness are integral to the cultural matrix, to the way Orsognese women construe
themselves and others. The concepts of sociability and relatedness are ontological in the
sense that they configure consciousness of how one is to be in the world and frame modes
of self-representation. The concepts of sociability and relatedness are integral to a mode
of being Orsognese women say is characteristic of them. Third, a person’s behavior is
context-dependent and strategic. Regular patterns of behavior occur as a result of
practices generated in social interaction. There is a tendency toward consensus of
meaning in that systematic dispositions arise that accommodate subjective and objective
patterns of sense-making. Fourth, the Orsognese hold membership in a community that is
construed less as a physical place of residence, and more as a web of social bonds and
relationships. Sociability is a central concern of the Orsognese and entails specific
obligations, rights, and duties that configure social relationships.
It would have been difficult to read almost anything in circum-
Mediterranean anthropology for two decades after the 1960s without some discussion
concerning gender and the concept of separate male and female spheres. The idea of
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separate spheres became a way to conceptualize gender and relations between genders in
the attempt to understand the impact of patriarchy on the status of women in
Mediterranean cultures. At the time, the important questions concerned the status of
women, particularly in “traditional societies,” where patrilineal descent was privileged and
where industrialization and its accompanying transformations were still in process. My
divergence from this path of inquiry is not to be construed as a rejection of the large
corpus of literature through which invaluable contributions were made that have enhanced
our understanding of gender in Mediterranean cultures. Rather, I depart from this
literature primarily because the data I gathered during fieldwork offered an opportunity to
re-think the merit of the separate sphere approach. While inferior status and oppressive
restraints in these cultures were no doubt aspects of the historical experience of women
and should be recorded, the limitation of this approach, in my mind, is that it makes it
appear either that women were largely passive, or that they chose not to react to male
pressure or to the restraints of patriarchal society. Such inquiry fails to elicit the positive
and essential way in which women have functioned in history. Treating women—or, for
that matter, all designated “others” within a society—as victims of oppression and
repression once again places them in a dominant-defined conceptual framework. I believe
that the true history of women is the history of actual women, their on-going function in
that dominant male-defined world, on their own terms.
When I asked narrators to tell me about their experiences during the war,
Orsognese women interpreted my question as going beyond their memory of what
happened to expressing the multidimensional and multisensory reality of what happened.
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to communicating, somehow, the texture of that historical experience. In other words, the
narrators heard my question as an invitation to reveal the significance this horrific
experience had for them as women. The Orsognese women speak from inside the past
they are describing, a past that is remembered as a complex set of experiences. Having
lived that past, they speak with a personal authority neither constrained by time nor limited
by their gender.
Personal authority—evoked when one chooses to act rather than to react—is
perhaps the most fundamental form of individual power. It is thus distinguished from the
more common understanding of power, which is the ability to exercise control over others.
The latter has been the measure used to determine the degree to which Italian women
exercise power. Personal authority must also be distinguished from concepts of authority
in general that come by virtue of association with another in authority—i.e., with a
powerful person or an institution in which authority is vested by some common or formal
agreement among members of a society.
Following Gilligan (1982), many feminist scholars, particularly those
working in American culture, point out that women tend to see themselves as embedded in
their social context and tend to make choices based on their assessment as to how
everyone involved will be affected. A cultural emphasis on the individual as a bounded,
coherent, unified self—prevalent in North America—would necessarily interpret social
embeddedness as something that makes it difficult for women to exercise power and to
recognize their own self interests. The inference is that it is difficult if not impossible to
exercise personal authority without the recognition that one’s self-interest exists
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independent of and potentially in contradiction with the self-interest of others. The
perspective of Orsognese women as social actors offers a different point of view. As
women, their social identity is enhanced, not diluted by, relationships. The social world in
which these women participate is structured by the categories derivative of these
relationships in such a way that the‘T ’ is not set in opposition to the “we.” At all times
and on all occasions, one stands in relation to another as someone’s wife, daughter,
mother, paesar/M, and so on. The Orsognese notion of “self’ is more about quality and
essence, exhibited within relationships, than it is about an autonomous entity guarding
self-interest. Actions are weighed in the context of relationships that bind people and
intertwine lives. That these webs of relationships constitute the fertile materials with
which one builds a life, that this intertwining of lives is considered “natural” and inviolable,
runs counter to the surface appearance of separate spheres. At the very least, it raises
questions about the applicability of a concept of embedded social relationships as a strong
indication of gender difference in one culture to that of another culture.
Narratives of Orsognese women about their experiences during World War
n are also family stories and, as such, they carry explicit messages about personal
authority for women (Lamer 1975). These stories create a communal understanding of
who the family is, as well as provide instruction regarding what constitutes appropriate
personal conduct. The stories recounted now are the formative stories, the stories about
hope in the face of events that crafted the current life experience of the teller. If I look for
the “empowerment” messages that mirror my own cultural notions, I will not find them.
More importantly, I will miss the “empowerment” messages that are inscribed in the
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narratives. Orsognese women’s narratives are extremely public, as they tell about how “F’
as a member of the community dealt with this terrible event in my life.
Though situations and circumstances associated with the traditional
exercise of sociability are ruptured, the women innovate by re-establishing sociability and
relatedness despite the disorder and chaos. Sociability, relatedness, and community are
fundamental to their mode of social action, to both gender identify and to the maintenance
of order in a social universe conceived as consisting of numerous overlapping sub-worlds
of social interaction. Sequentially and simultaneously, each of these worlds has sets of
traditions that are characteristic of and fully recognized by participants.
In the past, social science analysis treated the concept of “the person” as if
person was identifiable from an ungendered point of view. Currently, it has become
important to pay attention to positionality, a term coined by Alcoff to identify “the place
from which values are interpreted and constructed rather than as a locus of an already
determined set of values” (Alcoff 1988,433). Alcoff s notion of positionality
compliments Geertz’s idea of “thick description,” which refers to the rendering of
ethnographic reality by describing the layers of meaning surrounding an event (Geertz
1973). De Beauvoir proposes women’s subjectivity as a product of accretions: “A women
is constituted, in her subjectivity, by the position she occupies, the prescriptions,
ideologies, myths and other cultural constraints that structure the pressures she
experiences throughout her life, to be a good woman” De Beauvoir (1953). The
narratives provide evidence that there is no neutral, unconstituted place from which to
examine the on-going processes that produce “woman.” Instead, the narratives reveal a
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context in which Orsognese women as social actors draw on social constructs in whose
terms women create their identity. Narrators communicate their perspective on the past
by couching their descriptions of historical events in terms of the key components of
community identity, particularly the relationships among members that bind them together
as a community and make social stability possible.
Orsognese Sense Making
The women’s narratives reveal from their own perspectives what the
community and its history are all about. Narratives, oral and written, are artifacts
encrusted with information about relationships that constitute the matrix within which the
local events are perceived as having taken place. A narrator’s description of the past is
configured by her/his relative position and relationship within a variety of frameworks.
Narrators stress those episodes in the past that either at the time, or in retrospect, had the
greatest significance for them as members of a community.
Orsognese women use their relationships to make the past coherent. The sense-making
principle at work is not a linear chronology but involves webs of meaning and associations
of significance. Experiences are grouped according to the associations of significance the
narrators make among the events they recount. To the narrators, the past was more than a
series of horrific events. Rather, they recounted a past complex set of experiences in
which dramatic events punctuated or interrupted the routine flow of life, forcing them to
endure against a background of specific material conditions and social relationships.
Beyond incorporating the previously overlooked lives of women into our understanding of
the past, these narratives tell how women felt about what they did and reveal the meanings
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they associate with these events. In this regard, the women’s narratives challenge many of
the epistemological assumptions that guide statist historiography.
Through the personal perspective each narrator has gained on the shared
experience of the sfoUcanento, they have created their stories out of the things they did at
the time. Their emphasis on the experiential over the material of received statist history
holds true today, as exemplified by Dr. Silveri’s impressive collection of works marking
the period of intense migration from Orsogna to North and South America(Silveri 1989).
Whether the topic is migration or World War H, Orsognese women convey a sense of
place as integral to the way they understood their experiences in the world and the way
they talk about those experiences. Data embedded in the narratives are the elements of
ordinary living in extraordinary times. Narrators pull out of the stream of memory and
experience discrete events and craft narratives because they understood those events
illustrated important aspects of themselves and their community. In their narratives,
Orsognese women illuminate fi’om a variety of perspectives the local sense of community.
Without that sense, the narratives would not have taken the shape they have.
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